Authors will come to rely on artificial intelligence to help them beat writer’s block, the boss of the book publisher Bloomsbury has said.
Nigel Newton, the founder and chief executive of the publisher behind the Harry Potter series, said the technology could support almost all creative arts, although it would not fully replace prominent writers.
“I think AI will probably help creativity, because it will enable the 8 billion people on the planet to get started on some creative area where they might have hesitated to take the first step,” he told the PA news agency.
“AI gets them going and writes the first paragraph, or first chapter, and gets them back in the zone,” he said. “And it can do similar things with painting and music composition and with almost all of the creative arts.”
Newton, who founded Bloomsbury in 1986 and signed JK Rowling in the 1990s, said there could be a “problem” if AI is used to write entire books. However, he said that readers ultimately look for books written by famous authors.
“We are programmed deep in our DNA to be comforted by the authority and the reliability of big brand names, and that applies more than ever to the names of big writers,” he said.
“There will be some shoddy content out there so people will turn increasingly to sources of authority for reassurance,” he said.
Bloomsbury sales have been increased by a roster of high-profile authors in recent years, including the fantasy author Sarah J Maas, whose popularity has risen on TikTok.
Maas, the author behind the “romantasy” series A Court of Thorns and Roses, has sold more than 70m copies of her books in English across the world. All of the titles have been published by Bloomsbury.
Last week the publisher, which is headquartered in London and employs about 1,000 people, experienced a share rise of as much as 10% in a single day after it reported a 20% jump in revenue in its academic and professional division in the first half of its financial year, largely thanks to an AI licensing agreement.
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However, revenues in its consumer division fell by about 20%, largely due to the absence of a new title from Maas.
While Newton argued that AI could help new writers, many prominent authors have clashed with AI companies in recent years.
In September, the AI company Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn (£1.1bn) to settle a class action lawsuit in the US by book authors who argued the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
