AI in Publishing: One Rule for Amazon, Another for the Rest?

The AI Revolution Has Arrived – And It’s Awkward

AI is no longer a whisper in the wings of publishing—it’s centre stage, and the script is changing fast. From manuscript polishing to audiobook narration and translation, AI is reshaping the entire industry. But while publishers and authors wrestle with questions of ethics, copyright, and consent, one name seems to be quietly storming the stage with barely a whisper of protest: Amazon.

The recent launch of AI-generated narration and translation by Audible (Amazon-owned) should have been a seismic event. Yet the reaction from the UK’s leading professional bodies - the Society of Authors (SoA) and the Publishers Association (PA) - has been curiously muted, especially compared to their headline-grabbing condemnations of OpenAI, Meta, and Google.

AI

The Loud Bits

Let’s start with the outrage:

"The great copyright heist cannot go unchallenged. Big Tech needs to pay for the creative and research content they hoover up to train AI." Dan Conway, CEO, the Publishers Association

"If tech companies want to use creators’ copyright-protected work, they need to pay for that use... These laws apply to everyone – even big tech, and must not be eroded." Anna Ganley, CEO, Society of Authors

Strong words. Strong positions. But when Amazon announces its roll-out of AI narration and translation, claiming it will bring “every book in every language” to life using AI, the watchdogs barely bark.

Audible’s AI Announcement: Business as Usual?

On 13 May 2025, Audible revealed two new production pathways:

1. Audible-managed AI production, Amazon handles everything, from ingestion to distribution.

2. Self-service AI production, Publishers use Amazon’s toolkit to create audiobooks themselves.

Across both models, publishers can choose from over 100 AI-generated voices, with human oversight offered, at extra cost. AI translation from English to Spanish, French, Italian, and German is also on the horizon.

Yet the most public reaction came in the form of a polite statement from the SoA:

"Opportunities must be transparent both to authors and consumers... Authors must also be able to choose whether their work is narrated by a human or synthetic voice, and this must be clearly labelled."

Polite. Measured. And then nothing.

The Deafening Silence

Compare this to the SoA’s fiery condemnation of Meta:

"We will be hand delivering a letter to Meta... demanding that authors are fairly remunerated and that their consent is sought."

Or to the Publishers Association’s damning critique:

"The teenage demands of a tech sector who want content for free."

“The best form of AI will be intelligent artificial intelligence. And just like any pipe, what comes out of it depends on what goes into it. If we have high-quality data going into AI, then it will produce high-quality data at the other end.”Chris Bryant, Minister for Data Protection, Telecoms, Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism

This is where the analogy falls apart - or rather, becomes uncomfortably revealing.

Pipes are passive, neutral conduits. They don’t alter what flows through them.But AI does alter the input. It digests, reshapes, and re-expresses it. AI is not a pipe. It is a processing engine.

So by invoking a plumbing metaphor, Bryant is subtly (and perhaps unintentionally) trying to absolve AI of accountability, as if it's simply delivering content without transformation.

This is dangerous framing. It downplays:

• The act of synthesis and regeneration that defines large language models

• The issue of consent around using copyrighted works

• The idea of authorship itself, which becomes erased when AI is reduced to a hosepipe.

So why the disparity? Why no marching on Amazon HQ? No angry letters? No demands?

A Designer's Memory, A Writer's Lament

Let me switch hats for a moment. As both an author, illustrator and designer who’s seen the transformation of publishing tools from Letraset to layout algorithms, I find the hysteria over AI... oddly selective.

Designers went through something similar. We witnessed the death of manual paste-up, the rise of QuarkXPress, and the automation of typesetting. Yet no one marched on Apple’s offices with pitchforks and flaming torches. There were no press releases about the 'kerning heist.'

Why the difference?

CAD tools helped designers work faster, better, more consistently. But they never claimed to be the designer. AI writing tools, on the other hand, are explicitly marketed as authors, generating copy, mimicking style, and sometimes submitting work for publication. Writers are being invited to disappear.

There’s also the mystique. Design, for all its skill and creativity, was always seen as semi-technical. Writing? That’s sacred. The author is still treated, by themselves, their agents, and often their unions, as a vessel of culture. So when a machine takes on the voice of that vessel, it feels like an exorcism.

But perhaps there’s something older at work too. In post-Reformation Britain, imagery, especially elaborate Catholic visuals, became suspect. The word replaced the icon. Literacy became the new liturgy. In such a culture, writing acquired sanctity, and by extension, so did the writer. Designers, like engineers or draughtsmen, were relegated to a lower rung, brilliant but manual. The British class system, with its peculiar snobbery toward those who work with their hands, has long looked down its nose at the 'maker' while venerating the 'thinker', especially the Oxbridge-educated writer-hero of a certain mythology.

I can't help but see that bias playing out in real time. Think of the national uproar over the edits to Roald Dahl’s books, how Queen Camilla herself was supposedly appalled at the audacity of Puffin’s editors daring to 'correct' the original text. And yet, when a designers work is repurposed "refreshed", fonts changed, layouts reflowed, original concepts diluted, this is hailed as some sort of creativity given a kind of moon landing publicity. No one seemed to pause and ask whether the creative who had written, illustrated, and designed the original might have had a view on how it this worked - of course it was easier when the author is dead. It was assumed the publisher must surely know better.

Who’s Winning?

Winners:

• Amazon – First mover advantage, vast data reserves, total platform control.

• Large publishers – With legal teams and leverage, they can negotiate protections or carve-outs.

• AI engineers – Huge demand, especially in content curation and multilingual narration tools.

Losers:

• Narrators and translators – Risk of obsolescence or deskilling.

• Independent authors – Often locked into platform terms they cannot negotiate.

• Creative unions – Scrambling to stay relevant and authoritative in an AI-shaped landscape.

So How Might AI Be Used in Publishing (Theoretically)?

For Self-Publishing:

1. Narration of audiobooks via AI voice models.

2. Translation into multiple languages.

3. Cover design using AI-generated art tools.

4. Editing and grammar checking.

5. Market research (e.g., genre trends, SEO titles).

6. Blurb generation and metadata optimization.

7. Social media posts and advertising copy.

8. Plot development tools and character bios.

9. Proofreading and layout assistance.

10. Sales analysis via AI dashboards.

For Traditional Publishing:

1. Content recommendation algorithms.

2. Submission filtering for agents/editors.

3. Rights management predictions.

4. Contract summarisation.

5. AI-assisted indexing for nonfiction.

6. AI-translated foreign rights editions.

7. Automated audiobook production.

8. Book scanning and digitisation.

9. Metadata and categorisation optimisation.

10. Audience sentiment analysis from reviews and social media.

One Rule for All

The facts remain:

• Amazon is using AI.

• Amazon has a platform full of copyrighted content.

• Amazon isn’t compensating creators for AI usage.

So why isn’t it being challenged?

Until we stop pretending Amazon is somehow different from Meta or OpenAI, we will remain complicit in a two-tier system: one where creators must shout for scraps from tech companies, and another where one tech company just helps itself.

As both an author and a designer, I have no problem with technology. I have a problem with double standards.

AI has been quietly transforming publishing, but only some tech companies get called out. While the Society of Authors and Publishers Association rage against OpenAI and Meta, Amazon’s rollout of AI audiobook tools draws little protest.

Why the selective outrage? As both an author and designer, I explore the deeper reasons, how post-Reformation suspicion of imagery, British class prejudice against ‘manual’ creativity, and a misplaced reverence for “The Writer” are fuelling a cultural double standard. Plus: what happened when Puffin rewrote Dahl