Steven Rosenbaum started writing his book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality in 2022, around when ChatGPT launched. Initially he didn’t use it at all, “But as the writing moved forward into 2023, 2024, it got better and I got better at using it,” he said. “To be clear, it never wrote a page of the book,” he added. “But it became a research partner. I would ask it for quotes on certain things, and it would deliver them. They would occasionally be spectacular, often serviceable, and then, in very odd ways, just staggeringly wrong.”

“I kept thinking, I’ll be really careful, and I’ll double-check everything,” he said.

In May, the New York Times reported that Rosenbaum had included “more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes” in the book seemingly generated by AI. Rosenbaum, a media entrepreneur, had previously acknowledged that he’d used AI tools during the research, writing, and editing process, but the Times investigation was nevertheless mortifying — for both Rosenbaum and his publisher, Simon & Schuster. The book-publishing industry had already been wrestling with the prospect of a flood of AI-authored texts in the fiction market, and now the Rosenbaum scandal was showing the way AI could blow a hole in the nonfiction sector, too.

Nonfiction publishing is uniquely vulnerable to AI because the industry has long neglected to do anything to ensure the books it publishes are factually accurate. “People outside of the industry don’t understand that, contractually, publishers are not obligated to fact-check,” said Paul Bogaards, the longtime marketing and publicity executive at Knopf who now has his own PR firm. Fact-checking is not a service publishers will pay for, though they sometimes encourage authors to seek it out on their own dime. But fact-checking is expensive: Hiring an outside checker can cost between $7,000 to $10,000 per book, or even more depending on its length, which might not be feasible for an author with a modest advance.

Worse, it seems publishers have no idea what to do about this glaring vulnerability. “We don’t have systems in place,” said literary agent Alia Hanna Habib. “For every contract, there is a conversation, and it never really feels like........

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