How AI Is Cracking the Case on Medical Mysteries

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This podcast is sponsored by Comcast Business.

**Amit Verma** (0:03)
So CIO's role has evolved, and they're moving from being a technologist to being the bridge between AI capabilities and human adoption.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
That's Amit Verma, CTO at Comcast Business. He believes that continuous intelligence and operating posture linking people, applications, data and machines is essential for AI at scale. Later, learn why it requires strong executive leadership.

**Belle Lin** (0:34)
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, August 18th. I'm Belle Lin, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute. A new AI scandal seems to be engulfing the book publishing industry every month. It's become harder than ever for everyone involved to figure out where and when it's okay to use AI, and it's raising questions over whether the book industry will even survive. Then, patients with rare diseases can spend years searching for a diagnosis. But now, AI is helping some of them get answers faster. We delve into how it's letting patients, doctors and nurses crack the case on medical mysteries.
But first, not long after scoring a multi-million-dollar book deal, one novelist's agents suddenly pulled the plug. Why? Because they couldn't verify that the book had been entirely written by their client and without the help of AI.
That's becoming an increasingly common scenario as AI scandals and AI slop books sweep across the literary world. WSJ reporter Anna Silman is here now to explain what's going on in book publishing, and why AI may be an inevitable part of its future. Anna, what are slop books, and why are there so many of them out there?

**Anna Silman** (2:01)
Slop books refers to online books that have been written largely by an LLM, and often they contain material that is either or largely pulled from say Wikipedia and they are designed to look like real books to the people buying them. You know, there are companies and authors that just churn out hundreds of books designed to kind of game the algorithm on any given topic. They might come up with a title that looks similar to a title that's already in publication to try and deceive you to clicking it and buying it. But writers are using AI in all sorts of ways. Some of them are using it for help with research, for help with outlining, for help with coming up with inspiration. So it's a gradient of use, although it can be a bit of a slippery slope.

**Belle Lin** (2:55)
And usually when an author writes something, an agent or someone like an agent would get involved. What are agents doing about AI and writing?

**Anna Silman** (3:04)
I spoke to a number of agents for this piece and they said they're having a tough time. They're seeing a real uptick in the number of queries that they're getting, which they attribute to writers being able to mass spam multiple agents using AI.
They are also receiving manuscripts that have clear hallmarks of AI use. You know, M dashes and the it's not X, it's Y construction. There are other things as well, specific adjectives and nouns that come up more commonly, specific sentence constructions.
But the technology is evolving really fast. The things that we can spot as hallmarks of AI use now might change very well with the next models that come out. So agents, they're trying to act as a sort of filtration system, but it's not always easy.
And every agent seems to approach it differently. Some editors use tools like Pangram to try and detect AI use. Others are telling their authors, please be honest with me, and are drawing a hard line and saying any AI use is not something that I want to work with, and others just aren't asking at all. So it's really still something that's being figured out as everyone goes along.

**Belle Lin** (4:19)
When it comes to drawing that hard line, have any of the big five publishers like Penguin Random House or Harper Collins actually done that? Have they completely rejected AI use?

**Anna Silman** (4:31)
The big five publishers have by and large been reluctant to make sweeping statements about AI use. They want works that are original authorship, meaning that the text is written by a human, but they've stopped short of putting any restrictions on how AI could be used in other elements of the writing process. And I think that's largely because they are waiting to see how the norms around this technology evolve and things are changing so fast.

**Belle Lin** (5:01)
What about authors governing bodies or any other groups out there that might want to try and put a stop to this or put some rules around it? Has that started to happen?