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Barnes & Noble has been making a comeback over the past few years — which is impressive, since it once looked like the dominance of Amazon, the shift to digital books, and the decline of reading at large all pointed to the chain going the same way Borders did. Now it’s turning back into a popular spot to hang out in and even buy physical tomes, opening 60 new stores in 2025 with plans to do the same this year.
But this week, its CEO James Daunt decided to make a completely unforced error and step on a total PR landmine: AI.
In an interview on the NBC News show “Today,” he doubled down that Barnes & Noble would be open to selling AI-generated books, with certain caveats.
“I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t, and that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it,” he pontificated. “So as long as an AI-written book says it’s an AI-written book and doesn’t pretend to be something else and isn’t ripping off somebody else, as long as that’s clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them.”
It’s a comment that will nettle authors, many of whom view AI technology as being built on their stolen writing, on top of threatening their profession. There’re still a number of lawsuits brewing that could determine if AI companies plagiarized authors’ work by using it as training data for their models.
Readers aren’t a fan of AI either. Any time that an author or journalist gets caught using AI is an occasion for backlash and newsworthy scandal. Waffling answers on where a major bookseller stands on the tech aren’t going to satisfy anyone.
But if you are going to leave the door open to AI, Daunt’s stipulations sound reasonable: disclose if you use AI, or get kicked to the curb. Reputable news organizations have demands like this, and so do many book publishers; earlier this year, the novel “Shy Girl” was pulled from shelves by Hachette Book Group after its author was accused of heavily using AI to write it. Even the video game storefront Steam requires developers disclose the use of any AI-generated content. It’s the bare minimum.
“We have 300,000 titles across all of our stores. Do we think that some of those may be AI? The chances are that they are, but we’re not really conscious of them,” Daunt said.
That said, Daunt doesn’t think AI books are ever going to take off.
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