Waterstones’ CEO James Daunt has said it will do everything it can to keep AI generated content out of its stores. He told the BBC’s Big Boss podcast: “We use it in a limited way. It helps our customer service operation become more efficient. It helps us in logistics and how you deploy your equipment, but we don’t use it in the shops at all. And we spend quite a lot of time trying to keep AI-generated content out of our shops, but also out of our online operation as well.”
However, he said the bookseller would stock books created by AI if customers wanted them and they were clearly labelled, but it is “something that we would recoil [from]”.
A recent University of Cambridge study found that more than half (51%) of published novelists in the UK believe artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to end up entirely replacing their work. On these findings, Daunt said: “I think it’s possible that the sort of more generic end of publishing and writing, that that’s possible. Hopefully publishers will avoid it. We as booksellers would certainly naturally and instinctively disdain it.
“But at the more literary end, which is predominantly what we sell, I don’t see that being the case. And there is a clear identification of readers with authors. And indeed booksellers play an important role in joining authors and readers, whether it’s through literary festivals, all the events that we have within our shops, the exclusive editions, the signed editions, all of these things which have a personal connection between the book, the author and the reader. That does require a real person.”