Surveys are always great reading. They have more or less value in terms of understanding the challenging landscape, largely depending on their sample size and the transparency around it. This week we have a survey that’s both interesting and enlightening—and on the becoming-perennial subject of authors’ attitudes toward AI. It comes courtesy of a BookBub survey. This means that the kind of authors represented will be very like a sizeable portion of the cohort of indie authors. Indeed, 69 percent of authors who responded to the survey only self-publish, and 25 percent were hybrid.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
A Community Split on AI
It’s interesting because it’s been a while since a major survey of authors on AI. And things have moved on a lot since previous surveys, particularly with respect to AI-generated narration for audiobooks. The headline figures show that the author community—or, dare I say it, the entrepreneurial end of the authorial community—is split down the middle on the use of generative AI, with 45 percent currently using it and 48 percent planning never to use it.
In terms of reasons why people don’t use it, three areas stand out. First, the most popular reason by far is a belief that it is unethical (84 percent). Only a fifth refused because they thought AI didn’t do a good job. That’s the thing I really find interesting because it is a real sign that the debate has matured. Gone are the days when people said, “But AI will never…” And finally, almost a fifth don’t use generative AI because they use contractors.
Most Common Uses of AI
That final figure is really interesting given the uses to which the surveyed authors put AI. Most popular is research. This often feels like the most “benign” of uses because it doesn’t replace an obvious human. Many more people use AI for marketing art than cover art, and more than half use it for editing. Almost half use it for cover art, and around a third for narration and translation (but that may be more reflective of the fact people don’t sell books in those formats than that they use human narrators and translators).
The figure I will leave you with, though: more than half of the 1,279 authors surveyed use generative AI for writing.
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