No ISBN Means No Copyright Protection for Indie Authors

by | May 30, 2026 | Author Update | 0 comments

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Week Ending May 27, 2026

This week on Author Update, KDP’s new groundwood paper cuts your printing costs five percent, but is that good? AI pirates are flooding YouTube with full narrated versions of your books and pocketing every ad dollar while Content ID does nothing. Authors without an ISBN just lost their seat at Meta’s billion-dollar copyright lawsuit table. The Enhanced Games promised drugs would shatter every record, and they did not. And Pope Leo XIV quoted Tolkien in a 42,000-word AI encyclical that he may have partly written with Claude.

PUBLISHING NEWS

Publishing News

KDP’s New Groundwood Paper Beta: 5% Cheaper, Greener, and Acidic

According to Amazon KDP’s official Groundwood Paper (Beta) help page, the company introduced groundwood paper as a new interior option for eligible black-and-white paperbacks in 2026. Early user reports and KDP Community discussions indicate limited access began around late March, with a broader “now available” notification appearing on author Bookshelves around May 13, 2026.

KDP positions the option as a lower-carbon alternative that delivers roughly 5% lower printing costs per page and at least 15% fewer CO2-equivalent emissions compared with its cream and white papers. Residual emissions are offset through high-quality carbon credits. The paper also offers higher opacity and a textured surface that KDP says makes pages easier to read and turn.

Practical Advantages Authors Are Discussing

Early adopters on Threads, X, and Facebook groups report several tangible benefits. The 5% reduction in print cost improves margins on every sale without changing the list price, so the savings translate directly into royalties. The stock is lighter, running roughly 40 to 45 lb (60 to 67 gsm) versus KDP’s typical cream range of 50 to 61 lb. One author reported a small paperback weighing 7.4 oz on groundwood versus 7.9 oz on cream, a difference that could matter for larger print runs or author copies. The paper has a traditional mass-market feel, with a warmer color and a grayish or slightly pinkish cast that several authors say evokes classic trade or pulp paperbacks. It offers higher opacity for text-heavy books, with show-through that appears comparable to or better than cream for pure text in initial proofs, which suits genre fiction and novels. It also gives authors who want to market greener credentials a new talking point. For shorter books, the thicker yet lighter sheets can add desirable bulk to the spine without significantly increasing shipping weight.

Limitations and Risks Authors Must Consider

KDP’s own documentation and early feedback highlight clear constraints. The paper is not suitable for heavy ink or illustrations, and KDP states it is ineligible or risky for books with dense coverage because ink can show through, reserving the right to switch problematic titles back to cream or white. Spine and cover adjustments are required, since books exceeding roughly 350 pages on cream or 525 pages on white need updated cover files, so authors must recalculate spine width before publishing.

The feature still carries the “(Beta)” label, which means specifications, quality control, and eligibility rules could shift. Because the stock is lighter, some authors note it feels thinner and may increase show-through in certain lighting or with darker elements, even though overall opacity is marketed as higher. There are also long-term durability questions, because groundwood is produced through mechanical pulping, which retains more lignin than the chemical pulp used in higher-grade papers, and lignin breaks down over time into acidic compounds that cause yellowing, darkening, and embrittlement.

Modern groundwood papers are often buffered, yet they are not considered archival or permanent stock. You can expect faster aging than KDP cream or white, similar to traditional mass-market paperbacks that yellow within years under normal conditions. Cool, dark, dry storage slows the process, but groundwood remains a mass-market grade choice rather than a collector-grade one.

When Groundwood Makes Sense

Groundwood makes strong sense for text-heavy genre fiction and novels where readers expect an affordable, traditional paperback feel, for authors focused on maximizing royalties and reducing environmental impact, for shorter books that benefit from added bulk without extra weight, and for projects where the book is primarily a reading copy rather than a long-term keepsake. Authors should stick with cream or white when the book contains illustrations, heavy formatting, or dark elements, when long-term preservation or collector appeal matters to the audience, when a brighter and more premium interior aligns with the brand, or when they prefer to avoid beta features until more long-term data emerges.

Action Steps for Authors Ready to Test

To test it, log into KDP and check your Bookshelf for the green leaf icon that marks eligible titles, then use the bulk update tool for multiple books or edit titles individually through Print Options. Recalculate spine width and update cover files where needed, order fresh proof copies, and compare them side by side with your current paper choice under different lighting. Run the Printing Cost and Royalty Calculator to quantify the exact royalty improvement for your trim size and page count, and then monitor reader feedback and your own proof quality closely during the beta period.

KDP has not yet published official technical specs such as exact PPI, brightness, or pH values for its groundwood stock. Authors are relying on early physical proofs and community measurements for those details. This new option gives indie authors a meaningful new lever on cost, feel, and sustainability. The decision ultimately comes down to the specific book, its intended lifespan in readers’ hands, and the author’s priorities around price versus permanence.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: Most authors don’t ship many of their own KDP books, so the 5% savings probably comes partly from Amazon’s own shipping costs rather than the material itself. Anyone handling their own fulfillment is usually sourcing through Bookvault or somewhere else, so this discount applies only to the KDP version.

Jonathan: If you’re in the middle of a series, don’t switch. Mismatched paper colors on the shelf will annoy your readers, so keep using whatever paper you started with. The lighter stock can also increase show-through, which matters for readers who highlight, since their highlights may bleed onto the other side of the page.

Thomas: I wouldn’t use groundwood on hardbacks because it ages faster. For a hardback on KDP, stick with the standard papers. A lot of authors hear “it ages” and turn off immediately, but for 99% of books you get nearly all your sales and reads in the first five years. That means almost no one will ever handle the yellowed version, and an extra 5% margin makes a real difference.

Most readers don’t care about paper quality. They don’t know the difference between 20-pound and 22-pound paper, and they’ve never heard of lignin. Authors get deep into the weeds on this, but for readers it’s binary. It’s either good enough or it isn’t.

Before switching, order a proof copy. There’s also a small risk this beta never fully launches, though that’s unlikely, because many authors will switch for the savings alone. Anytime something is cheaper, you attract a crowd whose whole worldview is spending the least, and they’ll switch without a second thought. You can’t pass a 5% cut on to readers, since there’s no way to drop your book’s price by exactly that amount, so it’s worth experimenting with. IngramSpark has added a groundwood option too, but no one in our AuthorMedia.Social community has tried Amazon’s version yet, so we can’t say whether they’re the same.

June Is Patron Appreciation Month

This June, every patron receives the course How to Get Booked as a Podcast Guest. All patrons get discounts and a patrons-only episode, and toolbox-level patrons get access to the Patron Toolbox.

novel marketing patron toolbox

YouTube Flooded With AI-Narrated Pirated Audiobooks

According to Jane Friedman on the Bottom Line, the combination of AI narration and YouTube advertising has created a new, profitable form of infringement. Pirates now produce full-length AI-voiced audiobooks that run many hours, rack up thousands of views, and generate hundreds or thousands of dollars in ad revenue.

Key Details

The New York Times reported on May 21, 2026, that unauthorized synthetic-narrated copies appear for just about any successful author or series, including John Grisham’s The Widow, where one version exceeds 80,000 views, along with Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, breakout literary fiction, and best-selling business books. Pirates upload these videos within hours or days of official releases and monetize them directly through YouTube ads. A single new bestseller can spawn more than 5,000 AI-pirated audiobook instances online within one month, according to Vermillio data cited by the Times and Publishers Weekly, and those files together attract more than 200,000 streams.

YouTube’s Content ID system works for music and exact audio matches, but it fails for AI narration because pirates tweak pacing, add pauses, insert music, or slightly alter text to evade detection. Publishers and authors rely on manual DMCA takedown requests, yet the volume overwhelms them, and when one channel disappears, another often replaces it.

AAP Partners With Vermillio for a New Defense

On the same day as the Times story, May 21, 2026, the Association of American Publishers announced a partnership with Vermillio, a Chicago-based AI licensing and protection platform. Vermillio deploys its TraceID technology, which creates a neural fingerprint for protected literary works. The tool scans generative-AI platforms and distribution sites like YouTube to document and remove infringing copies in near real time, and TraceID is now available free to individuals worldwide, giving authors a direct way to register and protect their intellectual property. AAP President and CEO Maria A. Pallante described internet infringement as shocking and worsening, calling for fresh thinking, sophisticated tools, and strong alliances. Vermillio Co-Founder and CEO Dan Neely added that publishers are moving from defense to offense in the AI era with independent solutions not controlled by the platforms themselves.

Why This Matters for Authors

U.S. digital audiobook sales reached $1.1 billion last year, a 310% jump since 2016, yet piracy directly cuts into royalties for both authors and professional narrators. A 2025 Audio Publishers Association survey found that 35% of audiobook listeners have used YouTube, so unauthorized free versions compete head-to-head with paid legitimate sales. Poor-quality AI voices also damage author brands when listeners complain in comments or abandon the story. Indies face the same threat as Big Five titles, and monitoring YouTube while registering with TraceID offers a low-cost proactive step. Publishers gain a faster enforcement tool while continuing heavy investment in legitimate AI-narrated and human-narrated options to meet demand. This partnership and the public spotlight mark a shift toward proactive, tech-driven copyright protection rather than reactive takedowns alone.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: Calling this DMCA is the wrong frame. The smartest move isn’t a takedown at all. Instead, file a copyright claim on the pirated video so the ad revenue goes to you instead of the pirate. You can capture nearly 100% of the money even though you did 0% of the uploading work. Jane Friedman and the AAP frame this as pure theft, which it is, but that framing is also usable, because the same mechanism that lets the Vatican claim a video can let you claim yours.

There’s one caveat, and I’m not a lawyer, so check this for your own situation. If you’re exclusive with Audible, a pirate uploading your audiobook to YouTube may create a strange loophole, because you didn’t put it there. The onus to enforce probably lands on the platform that holds your exclusivity.

Jonathan: That’s exactly it. If you’re Audible-exclusive, the responsibility to police YouTube should sit with Audible, not with you. An AI-narrated version is arguably a different performance and a different product than the human narration you licensed, which complicates the question further.

Thomas: Performance rights versus mechanical rights get complicated fast, and that’s a rabbit hole. The bigger point is simpler. Most indie authors completely ignore the money sitting on YouTube. YouTube pays per hour watched, and audiobooks are long. People fall asleep listening to them, so the watch time is enormous, and there’s a whole cottage industry built on overnight ad content. A title with only 400 views at four hours each could earn hundreds of dollars.

Your best protection is to upload your own AI version first. Whoever gets the most views wins, and on YouTube it really is true that to the one who has views, more views will be given, because the algorithm rewards the leader. ElevenLabs makes this cheap and far easier than filing copyright paperwork after the fact, and you can always add a human narration later.

One of our patrons pairs the narration with B-roll, using ambient game footage from titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and hires an editor on Fiverr for roughly $20 an hour.

According to the official court complaint filed May 5, 2026, five major publishers plus bestselling author Scott Turow sued Meta Platforms for pirating millions of books to train the Llama AI models. The suit accuses Meta of torrenting titles from pirate sites, then stripping copyright notices and feeding the content into AI training.

Key Details

The proposed class action covers only books that possess an International Standard Book Number, or ISBN. Works also must carry timely U.S. Copyright Office registration, either within three months of publication or within five years of publication and before Meta copied the title. The class definition makes no mention of Amazon ASINs, unlike the recent $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement that let many Kindle-only titles qualify. The case sits in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and no class certification or settlement exists yet.

Why This Matters for Indie Authors

Pure ebook-only titles published on Kindle Direct Publishing without any ISBN fall outside the class completely. Authors who skip the free KDP ISBN option, or who never register copyright in time, cannot claim a share even if Meta stole and trained on their exact book. Potential payouts could mirror the Anthropic case, where qualifying authors received thousands of dollars per title. Free KDP ISBNs do count, because the book simply needs to possess an ISBN, and the court does not require a personally purchased Bowker ISBN in the author’s name.

Action Items for Authors

Add an ISBN to every new title, using the free KDP version for ebooks or a purchased Bowker block for print and wide distribution. Register copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office within three months of publication to lock in statutory damages and class eligibility. Check your backlist now, adding missing ISBNs on future editions and registering any unregistered works before the Meta case advances. Then monitor the docket and any future settlement website if the class gets certified.

This early-stage suit sends a clear message. Indie authors who treat ISBNs and copyright registration as optional steps now risk real financial loss when the next big AI copyright payout arrives. Traditional publishers and hybrid authors with print ISBNs stand to gain the most, while ebook-only creators who cut corners could watch millions flow to everyone else.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: We’re watching the $1.5 billion Anthropic class action get recreated, this time against Meta, which has even deeper pockets and committed the same crime. In the Anthropic case the judge found that training itself was exceedingly transformative and counted as fair use, and that the actual violation was downloading the books from pirate sites in the first place. Statutory damages run up to around $150,000 per violation, and Anthropic settled for roughly $3,000 per book.

Telling authors to skip the ISBN is bad advice. I’ve preached owning your own ISBN through Bowker here in the U.S. for more than ten years, because it gives you control over your metadata and protects the longevity of your catalog, and now it also keeps you eligible for settlements like this one. You want to be the customer, not the product.

Jonathan: The last lot I bought ran about $500 for 100 of them.

Thomas: And remember you need a separate ISBN for each format, so the ebook, paperback, hardback, and audiobook are four ISBNs for a single book, and a special edition gets its own on top of that. I’m normally hesitant to predict undecided cases, but this one looks likely to proceed, because the judge in the Anthropic matter essentially told plaintiffs how to win. ASINs might even get added later as a kind of reprieve for Kindle-only authors, though nobody should count on it.

Enhanced Games Flop Proves Gnostic Shortcuts Don’t Replace Hard Work

According to The Guardian, the inaugural Enhanced Games in Las Vegas on May 24, 2026, let 42 elite athletes compete while using testosterone, EPO, and anabolic steroids with zero drug testing. Organizers sold the event as the ultimate shortcut to shattered records and superhuman glory. The result was almost the opposite of the promise, because only one world record fell all night, and many races were won by non-enhanced athletes.

Key Details

Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev set the lone record in the men’s 50-meter freestyle at 20.81 seconds, which was 0.07 seconds faster than Cameron McEvoy’s official mark from March 2026, and he pocketed the $1 million bonus. Three clean athletes won their events outright. U.S. sprinter Fred Kerley took the men’s 100 meters in 9.97 seconds, Tristan Evelyn claimed the women’s 100 meters, and Hunter Armstrong won the men’s 50-meter backstroke.

Beware Gnostic Shortcuts

The entire premise was gnostic, resting on a hidden, elite knowledge in the form of performance-enhancing drugs that promised to bypass ordinary human limits. Anyone selling you secrets is usually ripping you off, and the same sales pitch floods publishing through $5,000 masterminds, AI one-click bestseller tools, secret plot formulas, paid-review farms, and guru courses that claim to shortcut the grind. These gnostic hacks promise insider knowledge that lets you skip the hard work, and the Enhanced Games just proved in public what authors already know deep down, that no substitute exists for talent plus consistent effort.

Placebo Study Drives the Lesson Home

A controlled study on trained powerlifters by Maganaris and colleagues, published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, gave athletes placebos they believed were Dianabol. The belief in the shortcut alone produced significantly larger strength gains than their normal training cycles. Once the athletes learned the truth, those extra gains vanished. The psychological boost from thinking you possess the secret can spark temporary extra effort, but it cannot replace actual physiological adaptation or years of disciplined work.

Why This Matters for Authors

Shortcuts deliver marginal or zero edge over baseline excellence plus hard work, exactly as the clean athletes who won proved. Real breakout books come from daily craft practice, ruthless revision, genuine reader connection, and authentic platform building, not from the latest gnostic secret. As AI writing assistants and optimize-with-one-click features flood the market, the Enhanced Games delivered an expensive public reminder that enhancements help at the margins while foundational excellence still decides winners. Authors who keep grinding, studying craft, revising until the prose sings, and building real audience trust will outperform every shortcut chaser, because the gnostic promise is always a lie and hard work remains the only reliable path.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: I’m about to go to war with the Gnostics. Gnosticism is the old idea that salvation comes through secret knowledge, paired with a dualism that says the flesh is evil and the spirit is good. The apostle John rebuts it directly when he writes about the spirit of Antichrist, and historic Christianity has always rejected it. Right now, Gnosticism is having a real moment among publishing scammers, and my Spidey sense goes off the instant I hear the pitch.

You see the same structure in health scams, where someone promises a secret supplement that lets you skip diet and exercise entirely. That’s the shape of the con, not advice anyone should follow. It has the same form as a conspiracy theory. T

he truth is that steroids alone won’t turn you into a world-record swimmer, but swimming will, and clean, well-trained athletes beat enhanced ones who haven’t put in the work. Publishing works the same way, so when someone guarantees results from buying their course or their AI tool, that’s the lie, and the grinders are the ones who win.

People love to say everybody has a book in them, and I’ll push back on that, because not everyone does. Success comes through hard work, discipline, and a fair amount of suffering. That’s why I named our course The 5-Year Plan, since it’s really a five-year plan to overnight success, and it contains no secrets at all. The whole method is to read one craft book a month and write while applying what you learned through a short story. I keep purging the language of secrets out of everything we teach.

Jonathan: I’d add one nuance. There are genuinely learnable basics and real fundamentals of the craft. The difference is between universal fundamentals that anyone can study and so-called secret knowledge that’s deliberately withheld from you until you pay.

AUTHOR ALERTS

Only 43 Standard Tickets Remain for 2027 Novel Marketing Conference

Super tickets for the Novel Marketing Conference sold out first, but standard tickets for the main two-day event on January 22 and 23, 2027 at the Fickett Center in Austin, Texas are still open. Authors who want hands-on book marketing training should register soon, before the remaining tickets disappear.

ElevenLabs Pivots to Compete Directly With Audible, Adding 200,000 Human-Narrated Audiobooks and a Premium Tier

According to Publishers Weekly, ElevenLabs added 200,000 audiobooks from publishers like Blackstone and HarperCollins to its ElevenReader streaming service.

This move marks ElevenLabs’ biggest step yet from AI voice tools into full audiobook distribution and streaming. It pairs licensed human-narrated catalogs with on-demand AI personalization in a single affordable app.

ElevenLabs cites internal data that 74 percent of audiobook listeners stopped a title in the past year because they disliked the narrator rather than the content. So now readers who don’t like a human narrator can swap in an AI narrator. The titles are part of the new ElevenReader Ultra tier at $11 per month or $99 per year for 20 hours of listening, plus options for listeners to choose AI narrators on select books while a free tier remains available. This is much cheaper than Audible’s top tier.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: The audiobook wars are officially on. ElevenReader is now squaring up against Audible and Spotify, and pairing human narration with cheaper AI narration is a smart play. The swap-in AI feature can rescue a book you love that has a narrator you can’t stand. My own example is Legal Systems Very Different from Our Own, where the author recorded himself in what sounds like a bathroom on a Blue Yeti microphone, and the result is honestly unlistenable. If I could swap in a clean AI narration, I’d subscribe in a heartbeat. Mostly I hope this competition forces Audible to start treating authors better.

1 in 5 PhD Dissertations Written with AI

More than 1 in 5 PhD dissertations now use AI, according to researcher Crémieux on X.

After scanning nearly 23,000 dissertations with Pangram Labs’ detection algorithm, which passed strict validation checks for low false positives and negatives, he documented a sharp post-2023 explosion in both AI-assisted and fully AI-generated writing.

Sources

Claude Opus 4.8 Releases With Boosted Writing, Editing, and Marketing for Authors

Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.8, billed as its latest and best model. The upgraded flagship delivers stronger long-context consistency, sharper judgment, richer outputs, and four-times-better honesty that proactively flags uncertainties and errors while preserving author voice and style across extended sessions.

Authors gain a more reliable partner for novel drafting and series continuity, developmental editing that catches plot holes and character drift with fewer hallucinations, and agentic workflows that streamline book-launch planning plus targeted marketing copy and campaigns.

Sources

Commentary

Jonathan: Four times better honesty? How is honesty four times better?

Thomas: It’s Anthropic responding to its critics, including Elon Musk, who complained the model wasn’t truth-seeking enough. The new version is more self-critical and catches its own hallucinations more often. To me the bigger deal is that it has a more interesting personality and writes better prose. The way I’d rank the recent line, 4.6 was a big model, 4.7 was a bit of a miss, and 4.8 is the go-to for writers because it’s noticeably clearer.

AI AND TECHNOLOGY

According to the official WordPress 7.0 Field Guide published May 14, 2026, and the Make WordPress Core announcement from March 24, 2026, version 7.0 ships a provider-agnostic AI Client and a centralized Connectors system that lets plugins and site owners interact with external AI models through a single, consistent interface. WordPress 7.0 reached general availability on May 20, 2026.

The change does not embed AI models inside WordPress itself. It creates the plumbing for plugins and future agents to call AI services without each plugin managing its own API keys, rate limits, or provider code.

What WordPress 7.0 Actually Delivers

A new Settings and Connectors screen lets administrators enter API keys once for providers including OpenAI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and others such as local models running through Ollama. The WP AI Client is a core PHP API that plugins use to request text generation, image generation, structured JSON responses, and other outputs, and WordPress routes each request to the configured provider and returns normalized results plus token-usage metadata.

The enhanced Abilities API, introduced in 6.9, lets plugins register discoverable, callable functions with JSON schemas, so AI agents can now discover what a site can do and invoke actions such as drafting posts or generating excerpts through standardized interfaces. The official AI plugin, version 1.0.0, shipped just before 7.0 and provides opt-in experiments including title generation, excerpt generation, alt-text generation, image generation, content summarization, and an Abilities Explorer.

Plugins built on this foundation share one set of credentials and usage tracking. Older plugins that built their own integrations will continue to work, though they won’t benefit from the centralized management.

Practical Features Authors Can Use Today

Authors can auto-generate or refine post titles and excerpts directly in the editor, create descriptive alt text for images in bulk for a major accessibility and SEO win, generate featured images or supporting visuals from text prompts, receive AI review notes or content summaries to speed editing, and explore registered abilities that future agents could call to automate routine site tasks. These features appear only after a site owner configures at least one provider and enables specific experiments in the AI plugin settings. The system degrades gracefully, so sites function normally with no AI configured.

The Pros for Indie Authors

One connection now works across plugins, so there’s no more re-entering API keys in five different plugins or wondering which one is burning tokens. Built-in metering shows consumption per plugin with budget alerts, which helps authors avoid surprise bills.

Provider choice gives future flexibility, because you can switch models or add local and self-hosted options without rewriting plugins, and that reduces vendor lock-in compared with earlier fragmented AI tools.

Authors also gain faster content and accessibility wins, since alt text, title suggestions, and image generation can save hours on blog maintenance while improving SEO and compliance. Finally, the Abilities API lays a foundation for agentic workflows, opening the door for AI agents that can discover site capabilities and perform multi-step tasks like handling content calendars, basic updates, or optimization in the coming months and years.

The Cons and Real Risks

API costs add up, because every generation call consumes tokens, and high-traffic sites or unoptimized plugins can generate unexpected expenses even with metering in place, since budget limits are soft warnings rather than hard stops.

Privacy and data handling matter too. Since content sent to third-party providers leaves your server, plugin developers control what they send, and authors handling reader comments, subscriber information, or sensitive drafts must review privacy policies and may need to update their own site policies for GDPR or CCPA compliance.

Quality and voice control still require human review, since hallucinations, generic phrasing, or tonal mismatches can damage an author’s distinctive voice and credibility if published unchecked. The ecosystem also has early growing pains, because many plugins haven’t yet adopted the new APIs, some so-called AI-powered plugins may deliver marginal value while increasing cost and complexity, and bugs and rapid iteration are likely in the first months.

There’s also dependency on external services, since outages, rate limits, or provider policy changes can disable AI features without warning, and while local models reduce that risk, they often deliver lower performance on complex tasks and require more technical setup.

Should You Connect AI to Your Author Website?

Most authors running active blogs or content-driven sites stand to gain measurable productivity from the low-stakes experiments, especially alt-text generation and title and excerpt suggestions, and the centralized architecture makes trying it less risky than previous fragmented solutions. Start on a staging site, connect one provider with a modest budget, and enable only the experiments you intend to use. Treat every AI suggestion as a first draft that you edit for accuracy, voice, and brand alignment, and monitor the Connectors screen and plugin usage reports weekly at first.

Authors with highly personal brands, sensitive reader data, or strict privacy requirements should move more slowly or explore local model options, and simple brochure sites or low-content author pages may not need AI features yet. WordPress 7.0 doesn’t hand authors a finished AI assistant. It hands the ecosystem the standardized foundation those assistants will run on, and authors who adopt thoughtfully now will be positioned to take advantage of the agentic capabilities arriving in plugins over the next year.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: Here’s how this works in plain English. You connect your own ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account inside WordPress, and then you can ask it to do something like write a meta description for a post. The AI does the task for you rather than teaching you how to do it.

Remember the rule that you want to be the customer, not the product, so pick one AI and lean into it. My personal favorite is Grok, especially for research, though getting that research into WordPress takes a few extra steps. I’d actually use Claude as the best of them, but it’s expensive. I currently pay for Gemini through Google Workspace, plus Grok, plus ChatGPT, plus Anthropic, and the only one where I regularly hit limits is Anthropic’s Claude.

On that note, Opus 4.8 burns through tokens. I torched a five-hour usage window in about 30 minutes and got timed out. Still, there’s no real reason not to upgrade WordPress, since it’s free, and Divi 5.0 now lets you talk to your design, so our entire Patron Toolbox page started as an AI prompt.

Someone asked whether it’s better to pay for an AI directly or go through a platform like Straico or Perplexity. Straico gives you one purchase for access to all the models, but you can’t integrate a model from Straico into WordPress. Beginners can test-drive the different models through Straico, which is great, but once you’re working on real projects and building real skills, pick one and pay for it directly, because that’s the game-changing move. Straico is also wonderful for brainstorming, since you can ask four models the same question at once.

Jonathan: A few cautions. The AI often needs two or three tries and can break things along the way, so use a staging site, stick to one provider, and set a budget limit, remembering that the limit is a soft warning rather than a hard stop.

Thomas: Right, and this approach isn’t going through an API the way the Patron Toolbox does. With our royalty analyzer one publisher burned $80 in 30 minutes on the API. The WordPress AI Client uses your own subscription instead, so the worst case is a timeout rather than an overage charge. One tip is to ask your AI directly how you can use its projects feature better.

MailerLite Responds to Kit’s Dominance with a Distraction-Free Newsletter Editor of Its Own

According to MailerLite’s official blog post published May 13, 2026, the company launched two new email editors designed for different creator workflows. The Simple email editor replaces the old Rich-Text editor with a clean, keyboard-first canvas, and the rebuilt Custom HTML editor adds live preview, syntax highlighting, and an integrated AI agent.

The Simple Email Editor

MailerLite built the new editor for writers who want emails to feel personal rather than promotional. They’re targeting founders, solopreneurs, newsletter creators, and authors who draft in Google Docs, Notion, or AI tools and need formatting to survive the paste.

Key features include a single-column, distraction-free canvas with Markdown support and a slash-command menu for headings, lists, images, buttons, dividers, quotes, and variables. It offers strong copy-paste fidelity from Google Docs, Notion, and AI outputs, so bold text, lists, links, and images stay intact without extra cleanup.

One-time brand style settings for fonts, colors, and typography apply automatically, and the editor includes built-in personalization variables, mobile responsiveness by default, instant autosave, and familiar keyboard shortcuts.

The editor stays intentionally lean in its first release, omitting video blocks, tables, and AI writing assistance for now, and it sits alongside the existing drag-and-drop editor rather than replacing it. Authors who prefer text-heavy, founder-style newsletters now have a dedicated tool that matches the writing experience on platforms like Kit, Substack, or Beehiiv, and the Simple editor is available on every plan, including the free plan.

The Custom HTML Editor

MailerLite rebuilt the Custom HTML editor from the ground up for users who need pixel-level control or who import designs from Canva and other tools. It now includes live preview, syntax highlighting, real-time validation, search-and-replace, and one-click code formatting, with automatic CSS inlining enabled by default for better email-client compatibility. It also adds drag-and-drop ZIP import up to 10MB optimized for Canva exports, with images saving automatically to the MailerLite file manager.

An integrated AI agent accepts plain-English commands inside the editor, so users can type instructions to add a hero section with a dark background and a centered call-to-action button, or to fix the padding on the button and make the font bold, and the agent also checks for broken tags and missing alt text. The Custom HTML editor requires an Advanced plan, and a 14-day trial gives access to all premium features without a credit card.

Why This Matters for Authors

Email remains one of the most reliable channels indie authors control. Many authors already draft newsletters and launch announcements in Google Docs or Notion before moving them into their email service provider.

The new Simple editor removes a common friction point by preserving that formatting on paste, and it supports the personal, text-first voice that builds reader trust and works well for serialized content, curation newsletters, or founder updates. Authors who hire designers or export from Canva gain faster import paths through the improved Custom HTML editor and its AI sidekick. Those migrating from Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or ActiveCampaign can bring existing HTML templates more cleanly.

The updates position MailerLite more competitively against creator-focused tools like Kit. Authors on the free plan now get a writing-focused editor without upgrading, and authors already on Advanced plans gain AI-assisted coding without leaving the platform. Both editors work with MailerLite’s existing automation, segmentation, A/B testing, and reporting features, so authors can start a campaign in the Simple editor for a personal newsletter and switch to drag-and-drop or Custom HTML for a more visual launch sequence.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: This is great news for MailerLite users. My one long-standing critique is that MailerLite was built for small businesses rather than for creators, which is why its emails so often land in the Gmail Promotions tab.

The best author emails feel personal, like they belong in the main inbox, with no banner and no heavy HTML, because fancy graphics actually reduce performance. The fancy editor now bolts on Canva and AI, which is fine, and I love the healthy competition, since you’re the customer and you can always move.

MailChimp tends to squeeze the people who feel stuck, while companies like Beehiiv, Kit, MailerLite, Substack, and Patreon push each other toward excellence.

I  still prefer Kit (Affiliate Link), because it has the most generous free plan, though MailerLite is cheaper once you’re paying. Roughly four out of five people in our community prefer Kit, with about one in five being die-hard MailerLite fans. I only teach Kit in our free Send Your First Email Challenge, and this update clears up a lot of the old complaints people had about MailerLite.

The Butlerian Jihad Comes for Hollywood Producer Jorge R. Gutierrez

According to Deadline, Jorge R. Gutierrez dropped out of Amazon’s GenAI program on May 29, 2026. The creator of The Book of Life, El Tigre, and Maya and the Three announced he will not make the AI-assisted series Punky Duck.

The Spark

Amazon MGM Studios and AWS unveiled the GenAI Creators’ Fund on May 27, 2026, at the AI on the Lot conference, and the fund greenlit three animated series powered by Project Nara, Amazon’s purpose-built AI production platform.

Punky Duck followed a punk duck and Smiley Cat through chaotic Los Angeles adventures with aliens and monsters. Gutierrez called the fast greenlight, which went from pitch to approval in two months, a miracle in an industry that usually drags projects out for years, and at the event he described AI animation in startlingly intimate terms, comparing it to being handed a baby right after conception.

The Backlash

The animation community erupted. Fans and peers dug up Gutierrez’s earlier posts, including an October 2025 message where he wrote that AI would flood the market with slop while making skilled artists more valuable, and critics labeled the move hypocrisy and a sell-out.

Social media filled with accusations, and some of them crossed into death threats against him and his family. Gutierrez responded on May 28 with a statement to Cartoon Brew, calling the project a big experiment and pledging to stay as cautious as possible with artists driving the technology rather than the other way around, and he left his X comments open for feedback.

The Reversal

Gutierrez then posted on X that he had decided to drop out of the AI program at Amazon and would not be making a Punky Duck series, writing that actions speak louder than words. He explained that his intent had been to showcase artists, both new and seasoned and both inside and outside the studios, driving this new technology, and he offered his sincerest apology to those he upset, promising to do better and to try harder. Peers, including some voice actors, praised the decision.

Why This Matters for Authors

The incident shows how quickly community sentiment can kill a project even when a major studio and an established creator back it. Authors who experiment with AI for covers, marketing assets, or drafting tools now see the personal and professional cost of perceived inconsistency.

Indie writers who once defended AI as a tool face the same pressure that traditional houses apply to illustrators and cover artists. The Butlerian Jihad reference from Dune, which names humanity’s war against thinking machines, captures the current mood, because many creators treat any AI involvement as a betrayal of the craft. Cash-flow realities still push creators toward faster tools, yet public backlash can erase opportunities in days.

This story signals that the AI debate has moved beyond theory, since studios test the waters, creators test the limits, and audiences enforce the rules. Authors who plan to use AI in any visible way should prepare for similar scrutiny or build transparent processes that keep human artists in the driver’s seat.

Sources

Commentary

Thomas: This was a mistake on his part, and the lesson is to never feed the trolls, because doing so killed his shot at being a showrunner. I do have real empathy for him, since the threats reached his family, and that’s indefensible. People also pushed back on the phrase Butlerian Jihad, mostly folks who’ve never read Dune or its Orange Catholic Bible, which contains the commandment against making a machine in the likeness of a human mind. The phrase actually fits, because the anti-AI movement doesn’t have a name yet. They aren’t really Luddites either, since hardly anyone even knows who Ned Ludd was, so I use Butlerian Jihad as a broad-strokes, slightly teasing label.

Here’s the political insight underneath all this. The backlash rests on the Marxist labor theory of value. Think about an apple pie, or the way Starship Troopers frames value. A novice cook can destroy good ingredients, a decent home cook produces something fine, and a chef produces something wonderful, which proves value isn’t the same as labor.

Marxists have no objective standard of beauty, so they end up judging art by the effort behind it, which is why they’ll call something AI slop even when it’s indistinguishable from human work. Show a Marxist a Monet and tell them it was AI, and suddenly it’s slop. Hollywood is essentially Marxists critiquing other Marxists, and Gutierrez has no real answer to them.

Jonathan: I’d add that the labor framing exists to propagandize laborers and activate them politically. It was never really about the means of production.

ZEITGEIST

Zeitgeist: Pope Leo XIV Gives Catholic Novelists Green Light to Use AI

Thomas: If you want to hear an intelligent, nuanced critique of AI, the best one I’ve found so far is from, of all people, Pope Leo XIV. He wrote a 42,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and I listened to the entire thing in preparation for this episode. I have a lot to say, but first, Jonathan, give us a summary, and then I’ll start talking.

What is in the encyclical?

Jonathan: Let me do a brief overview. I’ll explain what the chapters were about, tell you what the encyclical is about, and then Thomas will go into what to pull out of it.

This document applied Catholic social teaching to artificial intelligence. It urges disarmament, transparency, and human oversight to protect human dignity in an AI-driven world.

  • Chapter one traces the tradition from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 through every major social encyclical, grounding the document in the principles of human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity.
  • Chapter two examines the present technological moment with deep technical nuance, treating AI as a valuable tool that requires vigilance while rejecting both naive optimism and outright rejection.
  • Chapter three applies these principles to concrete realities, including work, surveillance, rare earth ethics, CCP-style data regimes, techno-slavery, and the disarmament of autonomous weapons that remove human moral judgment.
  • Chapter four calls for shared international governance, transparency, and accountability so technology serves integral human development rather than domination or profit.
  • Chapter five delivers an explicitly anti-Gnostic and incarnational vision, contrasting the flesh made of silicon of transhumanism with Jesus, the Word made flesh, as humanity’s only path to salvation.

What is an encyclical? It’s a pastoral letter written by the Pope to address major theological, moral, or social issues facing the Catholic Church and humanity. It’s designed to be propagated throughout the world, not hidden or held back. This is Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical since his election.

Why should authors care what the Pope thinks?

Thomas: Pope Leo XIV is a mathematician and an American, and you could argue the reason he was elected pope was to write this encyclical and grapple with this issue. Most of the encyclical wasn’t actually about AI, even though that’s all anyone is talking about. I read the whole thing, and he hits a lot of topics, many of them economic, that AI has affected or influenced.

It’s really well done. A lot of the concerns I’ve had with AI, the Pope has had too, and for the same reasons, so it was very encouraging for me.

Full disclosure, I’m not Catholic. I’m a Christian, not Catholic. I think I’m friendlier to Catholics than Jonathan is an independent fundamentalist Baptist.

We should care about this partly because it’s the first really well-reasoned articulation about AI from a Christian source, really from any religious source. This is the initial draft everyone will be reacting to.

Up to this point, AI has mostly been discussed by journalists who don’t understand it very well, technologists who do but can’t communicate, and politicians. I haven’t heard any pastors give sermons on AI.

There was a church in my town that used AI to prepare the service, but mostly it’s been hush-hush. The people I’ve heard critiquing AI from a religious context don’t know much about it. I listened to one podcast episode, actually for authors and about AI, and it was clear the critiques came from someone who didn’t know what AI was. He couldn’t tell the difference between machine learning and a large language model, and he didn’t know what a neural network was.

It was moralistic and emotional, all reacting to the marketing around AI rather than the actual function of AI. It wasn’t a helpful critique because he didn’t know what he was talking about. Which is fine. Not everyone knows what they’re talking about.

I’m going to pull out some things from this encyclical that I thought were valuable for authors. I also have a Q&A I’ll do with Jonathan, specific moral questions for Catholic authors, what they can and can’t do, because the Pope was very clear about what Catholics can and cannot do. It’ll be interesting doing this as non-Catholics.

The Pope demonstrated really deep technical understanding and a surprising amount of nuance. He treats AI the same way I do, as a valuable tool, and he didn’t call for a Butlerian crusade against the machines, despite the memes on X.

Did the Pope use AI to write it?

Thomas: It’s also very likely the Pope used AI to help write this encyclical. Certain sections started sounding very AI to me as I listened. A bunch of people have run tests using various AI detection tools, and certain chapters tested positive for AI use. Specifically, it had a lot of Claudisms.

Jonathan: He’s American, though, not Italian. The Italian version, the original, tested higher for AI use. It was probably translated.

Thomas: The Pope authors the encyclical, but he doesn’t write it. He’s got a whole team of priests and bishops writing these encyclicals with him.

It’s not a papal bull, which is more like a bill that says, “This is what the law is.” This is more like a sermon. It’s not that he himself wrote every word with a quill pen. Italian isn’t his native language, but he’s worked in the Vatican a long time, so he’s probably pretty good with it.

The Italian version tested higher for AI than the English translation. That tells me it’s possible that while he used AI to help draft the Italian version, it was translated into English by humans. The one thing the Vatican is not hurting for is translators, particularly from Italian into English. They’ve got good translators, and they’re not going to use a machine for that.

Is the Catholic Church really anti-science?

Thomas: The villain of this encyclical was not the technology. There’s a popular meme online that the Catholic Church is anti-science or anti-technology, and this is very ignorant. The Catholic Church invented science.

Before the Catholic Church, we had alchemy, which was Gnostic and secret. It’s the Christian value of revelation, as opposed to hiding information, that’s the foundation of science.

Most people, when they get a science education in school, are really getting propagandized. I can prove this with your own knowledge. The goal of the science education you got in high school was not to teach you useful information. It was to propagandize you.

You probably spent an entire semester on evolution. You’re probably very articulate on evolution, which is not a scientific theory you’ve used at all in your life. There’s not a single question that understanding evolution has helped you solve.

Yet you don’t know the difference between a watt, an amp, and a volt, which is scientific knowledge that would save your life if you understood it. It wasn’t taught to you because it’s not helpful in propagandizing you against the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church invented science, has been doing science, and is pro-science. As a Protestant, as a conservative Evangelical, I see the Catholic Church as too pro-science. They’re too accepting of science for my preference. To be fair to them, though, they’ve always been pro-science from the very beginning. They invented science.

Even the Galileo situation, people can’t really articulate what happened. That entire situation was entirely misinterpreted for you. It was not Catholics crushing Galileo because he challenged their view on how the world works. That’s an entirely wrong take on the historical facts. We can go deep on Enlightenment-era science if we want.

So who are the real villains here?

Thomas: The villains of this encyclical are not the science and not the AI. They’re technocrats, transhumanists, and post-humanists. That’s who the Pope sees as the threat.

Jonathan: Thomas, what is a transhumanist and a post-humanist?

Thomas: First, a technocrat is somebody who sees people as cogs in a machine, as data points, as something to be optimized. The value of a human comes from their economic output. That’s a technocrat.

A transhumanist believes humanity can be augmented with technology, so we can transcend our human limitations. The Borg in Star Trek are a presentation of transhumanism, where they’ve bonded flesh and machines.

Another version of transhumanism is the idea that you can transcend your physical body by uploading your consciousness into a computer. GLaDOS in Portal 2 is a post-humanist or transhumanist character. She was human, but her consciousness was put into the machine.

That’s very Gnostic. It’s the view that you have a spiritual self, a true self, and then a physical body that’s evil and fallen, so you have to change your physical body to better appeal to your true self. Or better yet, upload your true self and ascend into the machine where you can live forever.

Christians reject that. The Pope rejects that. How do Christians transcend their physical bodies? They do it through Christ, and only through Christ. That’s our only salvation.

Thomas: The encyclical warns against technocratic thinking that turns humans into cogs and devalues the human. One of the words the Pope used a lot was dignity. As a Protestant, this Catholic doctrine of dignity was very new to me.

He talks about dignity being innate, where we just have dignity. I assumed we have dignity because we’re made in God’s image, but he didn’t make that case. He said we have dignity because God loves us, which was interesting.

As a Protestant, I haven’t dived deep into the Catholic doctrine of dignity, but he used that word dozens of times. He was constantly using the word dignity.

What is the Pope’s view on disarmament?

Thomas: Another word he used a lot was disarmament. One concern the Pope has, and I share, is AI killing people, and we’re already seeing this.

In Ukraine, initially we had these drones that were controlled wirelessly. You’d put on a headset as a human, fly the drone, and blow up the other guy. Both Ukrainians and Russians are doing this.

The problem with a wirelessly controlled drone is that wireless is just another word for radio, and there’s a way to interfere with somebody else’s radio. It’s the equivalent of shouting really loud. When my wife and I are trying to talk in the kitchen, my children will signal-jam us by shouting so loud we can’t hear each other.

That’s effectively what you can do on the battlefield. One solution is, well, if I can’t talk to the drone, I’ll just give it instructions to kill guys wearing the enemy’s uniform and let the drone decide who to kill.

Currently they have these helium balloons they lift into the air. The drone detaches, glides down, pilots itself, and basically picks a human to kill. The Pope is not a fan of this.

He articulated that civilians could be killed, but there’s also a moral question. Machines are not capable of mercy, and mercy is a high value among Catholics.

Autonomous weapons remove human moral judgment, and by removing it, they remove human moral responsibility, or at least the appearance of it. It’s like, “It wasn’t me killing that person. It was this drone I made. The drone decided to kill them. I didn’t commit murder. This drone committed murder.”

By offsetting our moral responsibility, we can kill people without feeling bad about it. That’s very concerning for the Pope, and I think rightly so. Humans should take responsibility for their actions. We can’t blame the machines when we stand before God and give an answer for every deed done in the body, whether good or evil, as the Bible tells us. It’s a very scary passage, that we’ll be accountable to our Creator for our actions.

Does war without mercy just become a numbers game?

Jonathan: On a shallow level, I don’t mind killing people with autonomous weapons, but I do agree with the concern. I have an issue with losing mercy, because when you separate men from warfare, it becomes a numbers game. Stalin told us it’s way easier to kill a million people than 100. 100 is a massacre, a million is a statistic.

When war becomes about numbers of bodies instead of tactical precision and strategic brilliance to break an enemy’s will or logistical capability to keep fighting, something is lost.

I have this problem with Grant in the Civil War. Grant was not a strategist. He just threw hundreds of thousands of men into meat grinders and ran Lee out of ammunition. He had the will to win, but he had no problem with the price it took. I hate Grant as a general.

Lee, by contrast, optimized every position and the limited resources he had to fight numerically superior forces battle after battle. That’s warfare pursued correctly. When you treat it as a numbers game, where you win because you killed more of them than they killed of you, I see less value in that.

Thomas: We covered a story several weeks ago about an event in 2025 where the Ukrainians overtook a Russian position using nothing but drones. One of the drones was basically a bomb on wheels that rolled into a bunker and blew it up.

One of those bombs on wheels didn’t blow up its bunker, because the guys inside surrendered to the drone. The drone was controlled by a human back at Ukrainian headquarters, who saw the surrender through the drone’s camera and accepted it. I think the Catholic Church would say,

That needs to be preserved. Letting the drone go in, see the white flag, and blow up the bunker anyway because its programming said “blow up the bunker,” that’s what the Pope is concerned about. That’s what he means by disarming AI.

At the end he got very peace-and-love, let’s just not have war, and he quoted other popes who were against war. Popes have been against war for a long time. I remember reading about the Hundred Years’ War, with the French on one side and the English on the other, and they’d have to pause at the beginning of the battle while these bishops forced the monarchs to talk and tried to make the war not happen.

Give the Catholic Church some credit. They’ve been doing UN-style, give-peace-a-chance stuff for a long time. It didn’t work, and all the French people died at the Battle of Agincourt. Nobody listened to the bishops.

Credit where it’s due, the Catholic Church made an effort, and the Catholic monarchs on both sides let the effort happen. They got their tent in the middle, white flags, and they talked. Then they said, “No, we’re going to kill you,” told the priest to stand aside, and let the battle happen.

What about Chinese-style surveillance?

Thomas: The Catholic Church is pushing for total peace, but it’s especially pushing for disarmament. I want to move on to another element it pushed back on, and that’s AI-powered, Chinese Communist Party-style surveillance.

This document took a lot of sideswipes at the CCP and the way it treats its people like cogs. That technocratic leadership is very CCP-coded. All that language is very CCP-coded, the way the Chinese Communist Party basically gives you a score generated by AI. It surveils everything you do and gives you a score of how good a citizen you are. The Catholic Church is pushing really hard against that.

Thomas: The Pope quoted Tolkien. I want to share this quote. It’s a Gandalf quote. The ultimate goal for every Catholic novelist is to be quoted by the Pope in an encyclical.

We can give Pope Leo XIV the title of nerdiest pope ever. He’s a mathematician, and he quoted Tolkien in his first encyclical. I don’t know who’s in second place among popes, but we can pretty confidently give the nerd title to Pope Leo.

The quote from Gandalf is, “It’s not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we sow so that those who live after us may have clean earth to till.” I thought that was a really great quote.

One of the things the Pope was pushing back against was this doom idea, that there’s nothing we can do, that there are conspiratorial forces and technology’s so powerful we’re helpless. He says, “No, listen to Gandalf.”

Some people are more powerful than others, and the Pope acknowledged that, but our job is to deal with the field in front of us so those who come after have a cleaner field. I love that attitude. He’s rejecting this Gnostic, conspiratorial view and saying, “Do what you can with what you have.”

What can Catholics actually do with AI?

Thomas: With that, let’s go into a Q&A. I generated some questions specifically about Catholics. What can Catholics do and not do regarding AI? Then we’ll debate whether the rest of us can do it as non-Catholics. Jonathan, hit me with the questions.

1. Can Catholic authors use AI for editing?

Yes, as an aid for grammar, style, or suggestions, while the final edit and moral judgment remain with the author. The encyclical describes AI as a valuable tool whose power stays tied to data processing (¶99), and it stresses that human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, guides technical innovation (¶97).

2. Can Catholic authors use AI for drafting a book?

Yes, for initial drafts or idea generation, provided the author retains creative vision and spiritual oversight. The encyclical notes that these systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence while offering tangible benefits (¶99), yet it insists that moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation (¶198) and that the human person must guide the work.

3. Can Catholic agents use AI to read the slush pile?

No, not if the AI makes autonomous accept or reject decisions without human review. The encyclical warns that important and sensitive decisions risk being fully delegated to automated systems that cannot show compassion, mercy, or forgiveness (¶102), and that handing an algorithm the power to select who is worthy, with no one accountable for the judgment, surrenders the task of defining the boundaries of human possibility (¶103).

Thomas: The Pope gave a limiting principle here. A spam filter is acceptable, because as a human you can still review the spam folder, and that review acts as a final appeal and a chance for human mercy.

4. Can Catholic publishers use AI to read the slush pile?

No, not for final rejections or acceptances without meaningful human oversight and accountability. The encyclical argues that a system designed or used to treat some lives as less worthy, or to exclude them with no possibility of appeal, is no longer merely a tool to be used well (¶104), and it insists that responsibility be clearly defined at every stage so that someone can account for each decision (¶105).

5. Can Catholic authors use AI for research?

Yes, as a research assistant, while the author still exercises personal discernment and spiritual reflection. The encyclical celebrates technology’s power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home (¶9), yet it again roots that power in human intelligence guided by conscience and freedom (¶97).

6. Can Catholic authors use AI for plotting and story development?

Yes, for generating plot suggestions, while the author supplies the unifying vision and moral framework. AI can be a valuable tool (¶100), but moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation (¶198) and must remain under human conscience.

7. Can Catholic authors use AI to generate book blurbs and marketing copy?

Yes, as a drafting aid for communication, with final approval resting on the author to ensure truth and dignity.

8. Can Catholic authors use AI to create study guides, discussion questions, or companion materials?

Yes, for generating supporting materials, while the author ensures they deepen genuine human and spiritual engagement. The encyclical favors tools that foster dialogue and participation (¶192), provided they serve the common good without replacing personal catechesis or conscience.

9. Can Catholic publishers use AI for developmental or copy editing?

Yes, as an efficiency tool, while human editors retain final responsibility and accountability, since the encyclical requires that responsibility be clearly defined at every stage so someone can account for each decision (¶105).

Thomas: Based on this, I think the Pope would approve of my Patron Toolbox editing tools, because they force the human into the loop. There’s no auto-accept button, and human judgment is required to implement any of the suggested changes.

10. Can Catholic authors use AI for initial book-cover concepts and design ideas?

Yes, for visual concepts, while the final design decision belongs to the human creator or designer. The encyclical calls on developers to embed values in their projects with transparency and responsibility (¶111).

11. Can Catholic authors use AI to translate their books into other languages?

Yes, for translation assistance, while the author reviews for doctrinal accuracy, cultural sensitivity, and human voice, since the encyclical’s treatment of responsibility, transparency, and governance in Chapter Three requires human oversight.

12. Can Catholic authors use AI to create social media posts and author branding content?

Yes, as an aid for content, while the author ensures authenticity and avoids deception. The encyclical notes that those who control digital platforms hold a considerable ability to affect the collective imagination (¶136), so human conscience must direct the work.

Sources

Liked it? Take a second to support us on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

Leave a Reply

Want more help?

Get a weekly email with tips on building a platform, selling more books, and changing the world with writing worth talking about. 

You have Successfully Subscribed!