I’ve been using ChatGPT and others to do deep searches for other publishing houses which specialize in AI-assisted work, and there are surprisingly very few. Apart from my own imprint, Lost Books, I’ve only so far uncovered a handful of confirmed cases, including Centuria, ZeroState and one called Heard Island Publishing out of Australia which makes this “confidently wrong” statement in a LinkedIn post about them being first in this space:

Heard Island Publishing is an independent publishing house based in Adelaide, South Australia. It is, to our knowledge, the first publishing company in the world dedicated exclusively to AI-assisted and AI-generated literature, and the first built on a founding commitment to transparency about that fact.

I started doing transparently discussed AI-assisted publishing more than four years ago, as evidenced by this Newsweek piece I published on it. And I’ve gotten ongoing media coverage about it ever since, so their research above is incomplete, to say the least!

At the end of the day though, who was “first” is far less relevant than who is still standing, who is seeing some “success” (however you define that) and what the quality of the work is.