BoSacks Speaks Out: The UK Is Ringing the Alarm Bell. America Should Be Listening

I read a recent piece from the Independent by Harry Cockburn

out of the UK titled UK risks ‘losing creative sector’ amid rapid rise of AI, experts say and I felt something familiar.
Not surprise. Recognition.

The headline warned that AI could push Britain toward losing an entire creative sector. That is not a British problem. It is a preview.

If you think this is happening over there, you are already behind.

Let’s strip this down to what matters.

The UK article lays out three realities that should make every American publisher sit up straight.

First, AI is not creeping into publishing. It is accelerating into it. A novel is pulled because it is reportedly 78 percent AI generated. Authors point at editors. Editors feel a chill. Agents openly acknowledge the economic temptation. Faster output. Fewer messy humans. Predictable delivery. That is not theory. That is operational thinking.

Second, people inside the system are afraid to talk about it. That may be the most important line in the entire piece. When insiders start whispering instead of debating, disruption has already won.

Third, the economic pressure is real. Author income is down sharply. Content volume is exploding. Detection is getting harder. That combination does not stabilize industries. It destabilizes them.

Now let’s bring this home.

The United States is not just exposed. It is wide open.

We operate in a larger market driven by venture-backed platforms that reward speed, scale, and disruption. What we lack is coordination. In the UK there is at least a shared language around a creative sector tied to national identity, cultural stewardship, and policy. There is a sense, however imperfect, that this ecosystem matters as a whole.

In the US we have taken a different path. For decades, I have said we behave less like an industry and more like a collection of competing fiefdoms. Each protects its own turf while the ground shifts beneath all of us. There is no central voice. No unifying leadership. No modern equivalent of a guild system that can frame the stakes and rally a response. The British instinct to view creativity as a national asset may sound old fashioned to American ears, but right now it looks like strategic clarity.

What we call independence has quietly become isolation.

And isolation, at a moment like this, is not strength. It is exposure.

Fragmentation is not a strategy. It is a vulnerability.

The article notes that more than 3.5 million books were self-published in the US in 2025, a 40 percent jump in a single year. That is not growth. That is a flood. When supply explodes and marginal cost approaches zero, value does not hold. It collapses unless something else steps in to create scarcity.

That something else is not technology.
It is judgment.

This is where I part company with the panic narrative.

AI is not the threat. Commoditization is.

We have been here before. Not with the same tools, but with the same economic forces. Desktop publishing lowered barriers. The web removed distribution friction. Social platforms rewired discovery. Each time, volume went up and signal became harder to find.

What is different now is speed and scale. AI compresses production cycles to near zero. It does not just lower the barrier. It removes it.

So the real question is not whether AI will replace authors.

That is the wrong question.

The right question is this. What becomes more valuable when content is infinite?

The UK article answers it almost in passing.

Voice.

Not output.
Not efficiency.
Not volume.

Voice.

That is the one thing AI cannot manufacture in any meaningful way. It can mimic patterns. It can assemble coherence. It cannot live a life, hold a point of view, or earn trust over time.

Readers do not connect to content. They connect to people.

That insight should not comfort you. It should challenge you.

Because most publishers have spent the last twenty years de-emphasizing the very thing that now matters most. They built scale models. They optimized for clicks. They trained audiences to treat content as disposable.

And now we are shocked that machines can produce disposable content faster and cheaper.

Of course they can.

The UK is calling for labeling, regulation, and government support. Fine. Necessary, perhaps. But let’s not kid ourselves. Regulation moves slower than technology and always will.

Publishers cannot outsource strategy to policymakers.

You need to decide what business you are actually in.

If you are in the commodity content business, AI will eat your lunch and ask for dessert.

If you are in the relationship business, you have a fighting chance.

That means investing in authors as brands, not interchangeable inputs. It means building direct connections with audiences, not renting them from platforms. It means treating trust as an asset, not a byproduct.

It also means making some uncomfortable decisions.

Not everything should be published.
Not everything should be scaled.
Not everything should be automated.

Discipline is about to matter more than innovation.

The UK article frames this as a potential loss of a creative sector. That may sound dramatic, but it is not wrong. Industries do not disappear overnight. They erode. They hollow out. They become something else.

The US publishing industry is already on that path. The only question is whether we recognize it early enough to change course.

Bo’s Final Thought

The warning is not coming from across the ocean.
It is coming from a few years ahead of us.

Ignore it if you want.

AI will not replace publishing.

But it will expose every weak assumption the industry has been living on for the last two decades.

And it will do it faster than you think.