Pulped by Progress: From Gutenberg's Press to Generative AI

By David Salariya

In 1495, the world cracked and opened a hatch!

Gutenberg’s press used paper from pulped rags to mass-produce text. Pulping up to make something new...is nothing new!

Printer's workshop from Timelines, created and designed by David Salariya, text by Peter Turvey, artwork by John James

From Rag to Data: What Gets Lost in the Pulping Process

Pulping is messy. It takes something whole and breaks it down - into fibres, into fragments, into something that can be reshaped.

In the 15th century, books were printed on sheets made from pulverised cloth - rags torn, beaten, and reconstituted into blank pages for the future. Wood pulp came later. But from the beginning, to share knowledge, you had to first break something down.

Books have always been trouble! Almost as soon as Johannes Gutenberg started producing his bibles in 1454, he called in the receivers. He didn't go bankrupt because of the printing press itself, but rather because of a lawsuit filed by his financial backer, Johann Fust, who demanded repayment of loans and interest before the printing of the Bible was completed, leading to Gutenberg losing his workshop and equipment. 

Today’s Generative AI does something eerily similar - not with rags or cellulose, but to culture. It ingests books, blogs, news stories, songs, and turns all this into word slurry. The results aren’t copies, exactly. They’re composites. Simulacra. Something new - and not entirely benign.

The machine doesn’t understand. It reconstructs.

Somewhere in that process, the creator disappears. The original voice becomes residue.

What we’re facing now isn’t just disruption. It’s dissolution - the creators disapeared.

Pulped by Progress - The Printing Press Made a Mess

Gutenberg’s press had already begun transforming Europe by 1495. Books were no longer the cloistered possessions of monks or kings or chained in libraries. Paper made from rag pulp became the raw material for a revolution.

And what followed wasn’t just a flowering of knowledge. It was exciting, revolutionary and chaotic:

The Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the shattering of religious and political power -these weren’t caused by belief alone, but by the explosive spread of ideas. The press didn’t just print books. It printed trouble.

Five hundred years later, we’re at another hinge point. The printing press made ideas replicable. Now, generative AI makes them recombinable. And once again, the creators are being left behind.

The New Scribes Are Machines

Generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are not just tools. They are devourers. They ingest everything: books, blogs, news, lyrics, academic papers, forums—even pirated PDFs. From that vast feast of language, they produce new responses—fast, plausible, synthetic.

These systems are trained on human creativity - but increasingly, they respond as if no human ever existed.

The reader types a question. The machine answers. The author is gone.

It's easy to draw a line from Gutenberg’s revolution to this one. But it’s not a clean upward arc. Gutenberg unleashed both freedom and fury. This moment may well do the same.

Pulped Paper. Now Pulped Culture.

Gutenberg’s press didn’t pulp anything directly - but the paper it used was made from pulped rags. Remnants, beaten and reformed into something printable.

Because today, it’s not paper being pulped. It’s culture.

The great LLMs of our age - Large Language Models - reduce books, articles, stories, and songs into fragments. Tokens. Probabilities. What emerges is sometimes dazzling. But it’s built on reduction. A kind of unmaking.

Not quoting. Not preserving. Replacing.

And the creator? Uncredited. Unacknowledged. The voice becomes vapour.

Welcome to Pulp History

I’m working on a new series called Pulp History - which might sound like a punchy title, but there’s more to it than that.

It’s about digging up the buried, the bizarre, the boiled down. All the juicy bits. The strange stuff left behind after the first pass of history.

And it’s not lost on me that “pulp” now also describes what’s happening to creative work in the age of AI: ideas mashed, strained, and spat back out by algorithms.

Call it progress, if you like.

But I see warning signs in the pulp.

When Fair Use Meets Fuzzy Ethics

The legal landscape is shifting fast. The New York Times is suing OpenAI. Universal Music Group is suing Anthropic. Meta is under fire for allegedly training models on pirated books from LibGen.

At the centre of all this? A battle over copyright, creativity, and a phrase with sharp teeth: irreparable harm.

Courts are now being asked to decide: Does training an AI on your life’s work count as theft? If no financial loss can be proven, does it matter?

Some judges say no. If the machine doesn’t quote your book - just learns from it - that’s legal. Even inevitable.

And lurking in the background is a darker possibility: a floated executive order (under President Trump) that would exempt AI companies from copyright entirely, in the name of “national interest”.

The press once broke the power of kings.

Now, AI may break the rights of writers.

The Historical and Contemporary Landscape of Credit Removal

The erasure of creators is nothing new. Throughout history, artists, writers, and innovators have been stripped of recognition for their work, whether through corporate policies, legal loopholes, or sheer indifference to individual contribution. The issue extends across multiple creative industries, from publishing and comics to film, art, and science.

The Real Risk Isn’t Copying. It’s Replacement.

No one’s accusing AI companies of selling photocopies of our books. That would be easier to sue.

The problem is subtler - and far more dangerous.

If a child asks an AI to explain the French Revolution, it may generate a summary indistinguishable from a textbook ,I spent years researching and writing. It won’t quote me. It will replace me.

For those of us who write, illustrate, and design books - especially for children, where clarity and originality matter immensely - this isn’t just theft.

It’s erasure.

What Can Be Done?

It’s tempting to give up. To mutter about unstoppable tides.

But we’ve seen revolutions before. And sometimes, those who adapt early shape what comes next.

We must:

• Protect our names: Visibility is legacy. Make authorship undeniable.

• Prototype, not just protest: Build tools, books, and experiences that use AI on our terms.

• Make ethical noise: Highlight what’s lost when creators vanish from the record.

• Strike fair deals: Partner with platforms - only on transparent, remunerated terms.

This isn’t about fear. It’s about agency.

The Pressure of Progress

Gutenberg changed the world with rag pulp, movable type, pressure and progress.

What he made was messy, glorious - and dangerous.

We’re at the edge of a similar moment.

But this time, the raw material isn’t cloth. It’s us.

Let’s not be turned to pulp without protest.

Sign the Petition! https://chng.it/5VNzXmJgD2 

via @UKChange

The Next Chapter: Standing on Silicon Shoulders

But let’s not be turned to pulp without purpose either.

Every generation of creators has stood on the shoulders of giants. Gutenberg’s press wasn’t welcomed with open arms. It was feared, misunderstood, even condemned. Photography was derided as a mechanical cheat until it became art. InDesign was dismissed by traditional typesetters – yet it gave a whole new generation the tools to make books from their bedrooms.

AI is not the enemy. It’s the next blunt, imperfect, and immensely powerful tool in the creative kit.

Yes, we need regulation. Yes, creators should be compensated when their work is used to train AI models. Transparency isn’t optional. And I fully support campaigns like Make It Fair, which push for micropayments and clear attribution.

But let’s not throw the creative baby out with the synthetic bathwater.

Because while AI may be good at blending data, it still can’t match human taste. It doesn’t know the thrill of discovery. It can’t feel the drama of a story twist or the joy of a well-placed pun. But it can save time. It can help a dyslexic child write their first poem. It can give a solo illustrator access to layout skills. And it can allow a tiny publishing team – or even a single creator – to build something remarkable.

This isn’t the death of creativity. It’s a reshaping.

The creators of tomorrow won’t just be painters, writers, or layout artists. They’ll be curators. Directors. Conductors of powerful digital tools. They’ll need empathy, imagination, storytelling – and a fluency in AI, just as once we had to learn QuarkXPress, Photoshop, or HTML.

Progress is always messy. But it can also be magnificent – if we’re the ones holding the reins.

So here’s to the next creative revolution.

Not just pulped by progress… but powered by it.

Pulp History - slice into the juiciest, strangest, and most shocking moments in the evolution of knowledge. This time, I'm asking: When machines become scribes, what happens to the people who once held the pen?

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