Tauno Vahter said manuscripts are usually submitted to several publishers at once. "I don't think very many of them are written with AI. You can generally tell fairly quickly when a text is heavily AI-generated. AI has advanced a great deal, but there still isn't a program you can tell to write you a book and have it produce ten printer's sheets of text that you would want to keep reading with interest," Vahter said. "It can produce shorter pieces."

Internationally, there have also been controversies in which publishers have pulled books from shelves or canceled their publication because they believe the books were written by AI.

"If you read the accusations on one side and the authors' defenses on the other, it seems to be a borderline mishmash. In recent weeks, Haitian-Canadian-French author Thélyson Orélien has been at the center of it. His book was initially submitted for France's most important literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. His text was run through software designed to detect whether it might be AI-generated and it said the book was 100 percent AI," Vahter said.

"Then a huge controversy erupted: was it or wasn't it? The author said it wasn't AI. And whose word prevails? Some publishers that had already begun translating it have said they're putting it on hold. Others have said they don't see enough evidence and will publish the book anyway. It's due to come out in Finland soon, for example," Vahter said, adding that he personally doubts the text could have been written by AI.

"It can't write a text that long without a person being able to tell. In theory, some passages could have been written by AI. Authors have defended themselves by saying they worked with an editor who used some kind of AI program during editing, perhaps making the text uniform enough for detection software to label it AI-generated. That's a very specific possibility. It could be true; I don't know," Vahter said with a laugh. "But I don't believe publishers are receiving and publishing huge numbers of manuscripts written entirely by AI. That's not very plausible."

AI is making greater inroads into the literary world in other ways. "Some uses are good. Take what we know as spellcheck, which simply fixes obvious typos and printing errors. But what's happening with illustrations is a little more interesting. AI first started appearing in cover designs. It's used quite a lot in book production in Estonia, too. On a bad day, everyone can tell — the covers look a bit generic," Vahter explained.

"But some covers made entirely with AI have already been selected among the most beautiful books of the year in the relevant competition. So it's all relative," he said with a laugh.

"What may be interesting is that illustrations for children's books made with AI are now appearing in large numbers. In Estonia, too, some authors illustrate an entire book using only AI. We can debate whether the result is better or worse. It's certainly cheaper and faster. It depends somewhat on how much time you're willing to spend refining the images. But in principle, you can get the illustrations for a whole book in a few hours. The temptation is probably strong," Vahter said.

"The irony is that AI's quality may even be better than that of some illustrators. Today, we can generally tell when an image is AI-generated. But I don't know whether we'll be able to in five years."

Although Vahter has yet to be approached with an original manuscript written by AI or with its help, he said such situations already arise with translations. "The question is how books are translated. The traditional way of translating a book is gradually disappearing: the translator would clip the pages to the book's covers with clothespins and translate directly into a file. The next stage was when translators began asking for PDF and Word files as well. They had the original below and typed the translation over it as they went."

"Then came what's called translation memory, which is used by translation agencies and is already a form of AI. It's an earlier generation of AI, but it can produce a first translation from a large body of text. Some translators with the right software would put the entire text through the program with one click and then review it page by page or sentence by sentence. If they do that properly, there's no problem. No one can tell," Vahter said.

"But we're now seeing more and more cases where they don't review it properly — they go through it more quickly. I don't have statistics, but reportedly about four-fifths of books in Finland are already translated this way. Alongside translation memory, people also use more general AI tools, which work better with some languages than others. We know they work better between English and the Scandinavian languages, but they can't produce as good a translation from French."

Vahter said the first cases emerged in Finland last year of lengthy fantasy novels translated entirely by AI. "One of them was a fairly well-known book. Journalists picked up the story and asked the publisher, which was by no means a small publisher, why it had done this. The answer was strikingly blunt: translation is so expensive! We can see pressure and temptation to use it coming from every direction. AI will probably transform translation and illustration first."

"It will reach original manuscripts, too, but it hasn't made such deep inroads there yet," Vahter stressed. He added that AI helps him run the publishing house every day. "Spellcheck is the biggest help. I also use it when a manuscript arrives in a language I don't speak — a book in Portuguese or Italian, for example. Then I have two options: find someone to read it, persuade them to do so and hear their opinion a month later, or, more likely, run it through a translation engine. Of course, the result isn't very good, but I can understand what kind of book it is," Vahter said.

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