The illustrators' demands convinced the publisher to change course and no longer use generative artificial intelligence (GAI) to illustrate its books.
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“We have done a 180-degree turn,” confirms Pratico-Pratiques senior editor Laurence Roy-Tetreault.
“When artificial intelligence came out,” she says, “our first instinct was to try to understand how it works and what we do with it. We saw it as a tool for our graphics teams.”
The publishing house's position changed when its management realized the concerns of representatives of the literary world.
“We are very sensitive to current debates and understand the issues well. Did we understand them well in the beginning? To be honest, not very well. I don't think people understood the issues at first,” she says.
“There is no big replacement”
Stating that he shares “the concerns and questions raised by the advent of artificial intelligence,” the CEO of publisher Les Malins, where AGI is used to design book covers, insists and signs.
“Our artistic director, who is herself an illustrator, has been creating digital works since the very beginning of her practice. As an artist, she prefers to use various tools, including artificial intelligence, to support her creativity,” says Marc-André Audet, who rejects the “great replacement” thesis.
“We've signed more illustrators this year than ever before in the house's history, and we'll continue to do so,” he says.
Unreliable tests
For Pratico-Pratiques, moving away from AGI comes with an unexpected problem: a lack of reliability that its employees say they have observed in applications used to detect the use of artificial intelligence in an image.
“We did tests with photographs that we took, that is, with people, and depending on one application it may tell us that we are 95% artificial intelligence, another will tell us 40%,” points out Laurence Roy-Tetrault.
“It's even more difficult than we expected. We didn't make the right decision, we're going back, we're not using artificial intelligence, but how will people trust us if it says we used it when we feed an image into an app?”
