Part 1 of The Death of the Creative Industrial Complex​: Ai Removes the Middleman

The Collapse of Creative Gatekeeping Has Begun

​By Charlie G. Peterson IV

​The doors to the HarperCollins building hadn’t changed since the 1990s. Mahogany glass. Executive badge access. The smell of old glue and big decisions. But inside, something had shifted. A quiet war was unfolding across editorial floors and Zoom calls. Mid-level editors were using Claude and GPT-4o in private. 

Manuscripts, pitches, and press releases were being fed through prompts. All while senior leadership issued new policies on "authentic authorship" and published op-eds in The Atlantic warning against the dangers of synthetic creativity.

The irony was thick enough to spread with a bone-handled knife.

Here.