Ethics and Publishing

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The first Wednesday of each month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. As members of this community, we post on our own blog our thoughts, talk about our doubts, the fears we have conquered, and we our struggles and triumphs. Go read the post of our awesome co-hosts here and here.

August 6 question: What is the most unethical practice in the publishing industry?

To tell the truth, I always feel bad commenting on subjects I do not know deeply. Do I find unethical material online? Yes, all this copying of other people's works, like plagiarism, bothers me. 

The Book Edition World: a Topic I Know Little About

I know very little about the practices in the publishing world. If we compare independent authors and those who work with an agent and a publishing house, there are differences, at least in my corner of the world.

Here, bookstores and libraries exclude independent authors from distribution. Only authors published by a “real” publishing house may be part of the collections for sale or loan.

I live in a predominantly French-speaking province, part of a country with many French speakers. Local provincial laws aim to protect the French language, support local culture, and above all, protect our cultural identity from a flood of English-language books from other cultural identities, if I understand correctly. There is still the independent route, which allows self-published authors to make a name for themselves, but it is very difficult for them.

Why do I talk about this? I think that not supporting independent authors could be a mistake, because we have some outstanding writers. We have several renowned competitions that promote these authors. As you can see, I don’t have an obvious position on the subject.

AI, Yes: A. I.

The possibility of writing a whole story using exclusively the words and drawings generated by artificial intelligence (AI) bothers me. To counter this problem, what looks like a witch hunt is taking place on some platforms. Unfortunately, some creators are paying the price. Authors claim they are falsely accused of having written and published text created by AI. Who am I to know?

Do we have the tools to do so? I don’t know. Only time will tell. As AI becomes more and more sophisticated, its capacity to converse increasingly humanly makes me uncomfortable. I agree we need to stay careful not to let art made by robots become the cultural norm. Who am I to set limits? Hey, I still use its help to write this so you get to understand my point of view.

There should be regulations to prevent our live translations and our grammar-checked words from plagiarism. When I validate my text on a platform,I want to know for sure it will not get into another book. If I read a book in English and want to understand an idiomatic expression in context, I need to translate it with one of these robots. Who can tell me that this text is secure? No one. No one. 

I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Humans read some, but it’s not the case for others, and I can tell the difference. On the phone once, I knew my interlocutor was not human. I think my long experience in communication, dating back to my early childhood, helped me point it out. 

For writing, I have experience, but I wouldn’t say I have as much as I do with verbal communication, so something could fool me into accepting a text as “human” when it’s actually AI. Keep in mind that younger people who have communicated less, listened less, and been less exposed to conversations between adults, friends, etc., will have a very hard time discerning truth from falsehood.

I hope that the future will prove my intuition wrong.

To summarize, limiting access to independent authors bothers me as well as not discerning human from AI writing. When one abuses my lack of experience and knowledge, it is unethical.


If you find my grammar is bad, know that I wrote this post in French, then got help from DeepL and Prowriting Aid's AI's to make it more palatable for you. ;-)

Location: Canada

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