THE BIG DEBATE
THE BIG DEBATE: JAMES LUMSDEN-COOK’ S TAKE
If AI does the junior jobs, who becomes the expert?
James Lumsden-Cook writes from inside an industry already being reshaped by AI. At international publishing company Bennion Kearny, where systems have taken on work traditionally used to train junior editors, he sees a problem that reaches far beyond books: businesses still need experienced people to verify AI’ s output, but may be automating the very tasks through which that experience is gained. This is his take on the apprenticeship gap technology risks creating.
The UK publishing industry is worth £ 7.2bn, directly employs around 30,000 people and supports 84,000 in total. It’ s an international success story, with over £ 4.5bn of exports, and represents – like our films and television – a visible and high-quality arm of British soft power and influence.
But the industry is built on shifting sands. Entire sectors now face existential threats( think travel guides and universal cookbooks, for example); back-office tasks are being automated; and specialist roles( indexers and proofreaders) are seeing work dry up entirely. And that’ s before we even drill into the tsunami of exclusively AIgenerated titles now flooding retailers such as Amazon. All these things could warrant detailed discussion, but my focus here is on the publishing pathway.
Historically, a publisher commissions a book idea or manuscript, then works hand in hand with the author to develop it into something publishable and, hopefully, commercially viable. It’ s a process that requires significant time and investment, and editors deliberate over a whole host of factors, including audience positioning, cost, add-ons( like illustrations), the need for permissions, and – of course – the actual words on the page. Before the book hits the shelf, others – including typesetters, printers, distributors and PR professionals – will become involved.
Generally speaking, the publishing industry has centred on an apprenticeship model of career progression. You would join as an entrylevel junior editor and learn the ropes by reviewing potential manuscripts, drafting back-cover blurbs, writing metadata, and – over time – expertise and experience would build. Having gained experience, you would progress to more senior roles with more complex and bigger projects, and your own junior staff to bring through the system.
Now, however, AI can do many of these tasks in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. AI can take an 80,000-word prospective manuscript and deliver a detailed critique in minutes; a task that would have taken an editor days. AI can also take a finished book and develop a complete marketing plan, including a draft cover blurb, metadata, press release, and advertising keywords.
At Bennion Kearny, we have integrated such systems. The three tasks I listed above as the junior’ s apprenticeship – reading full-length submissions, drafting blurbs, writing metadata – are three tasks now outsourced to technology. So why is a human needed at all? Because AI output is plausible but requires verification, and someone has to own the outcome: to tell the good from the bad, such as an accurate blurb from a plausible but misfiring one. That
JAMES LUMSDEN-COOK
judgement was built by a person doing the very tasks AI has now absorbed. Which is where I become part of the problem I am describing – I can make those calls because I did those jobs. Nobody I hire now will.
So, with so much publishing work becoming commoditised, the question is whether publishing houses will hire juniors. They are far more expensive than tech platforms, take a long time to train, and can walk out the door tomorrow. But if publishers stop hiring junior editors, who eventually will become the senior ones?
Oversight is still required. It would be a brave publishing house to green-light a print run when no one has taken a view. Think legal liability for unsafe instructions in a how-to or defamatory content in a biography. In 2023, for example, mycologists were publicly warning amateur mushroom foragers away from AI-generated identification guides on Amazon, on the grounds that several deadly species closely resemble edible ones. Nobody had read those books before they went on sale. It’ s the chain of verification, credibility, and accountability that a thirdparty publisher actually supplies.
As we go through this age of technological revolution, it would be foolhardy to suggest that publishers will disappear. They bring value, creativity, industry knowledge and the aforementioned accountability to projects. But they will need to evolve, and the hardest part of that has no obvious solution. No individual publisher has an incentive to train the people who will one day be answerable, yet the entire industry depends on somebody doing it. That is a collective action problem, and collective action problems do not solve themselves.
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