'We are on the brink,' say 70 authors in open letter to publishers urging them to limit AI use

Seventy authors, including

https://lithub.com/against-ai-an-open-letter-from-writers-to-publishers/

Authors petition publishers to curtail their use of AI : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/28/nx-s1-5449166/authors-publishers-ai-letter

Authors call on publishers to limit their use of AI | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/28/authors-call-on-publishers-to-limit-their-use-of-ai/

On June 27, 2025 local time, 70 people, including well-known authors such as Lauren Groff and Lev Grossman, published an open letter calling on the world's largest publishers, including Penguin Random House , HarperCollins , Simon & Schuster , Hachette Book Group , and Macmillan , to limit the use of AI.

The open letter from the group of writers reads as follows:

We're on the edge. At the simplest level, our job as artists is to respond to the human experience. But the art we make is a commodity, and our world wants things fast, cheap, and on demand. So we're hurtling toward a future where novels, biographies, poems, memoirs -- in short, records of the human experience -- will be 'written' by AI models that can't understand what it means to be human, to bleed, to hunger, or to love.

While it may seem like an AI understands our humanity, the truth is that only humans can converse with and understand other humans. Every time a prompt is entered into an AI, the language the bot uses to respond is the product of the artistic synthesis we, the writers, have spent our careers crafting. But it has been appropriated without our consent, compensation, or even acknowledgement.

In our writing, we have looked to our own lives: the death of our parents, the birth of our children, every romance we have experienced or imagined. Stories of human heroism and depravity. These stories are being stolen from us and used to train machines. If short-sighted capitalist greed prevails, we may soon have machines churning out the books we see in bookstores. Is this the end goal? To remove us from the equation entirely, so that those at the top of the capitalist structure can profit even more from our labor? So the revenue that a work brings to the author will go to whoever operates the AI, not the author.

AI-generated writing feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels simple because it is simple. That is the nature of AI. AI is a very powerful tool, and it is here to stay, with the potential to bring real social benefits. But replacing art and artists is not a boon.

The purveyors of AI have stolen our work, not just from us writers, but from publishers too. The jobs of the hardworking editors, copy editors, publicists, and publishers who cared for, planned, and published our books are at risk. The very form of publishing, a collaborative art nurtured by human hands at every stage, is at risk. The audiobook narrators who brought our stories to life are already being pushed aside by cheap and simple AI. To make matters worse, the use of AI will have a devastating impact on the environment, as it consumes huge amounts of energy and water. So what happens now?

We ask publishers to stand with us and pledge to never publish machine-created books, to not replace their human staff with AI tools, or relegate them to the status of watchdogs of AI.

We ask publishers to commit to the following:

We will not overtly or covertly publish books that have been written using AI tools that have been plagiarized from authors.
We do not allow the fabrication of 'authors' to promote AI-generated books, nor do we allow the publishing of AI-generated books that are based on plagiarized works of human authors using pen names.
- We will not use AI built by plagiarizing artists' work to design published books.
・We will not replace all or part of our employees with AI.
We will not create any new roles to oversee the production of AI-generated writing or art that is built by plagiarizing artists' work.
There will be no rewriting of existing employee job descriptions to oversee an AI built by plagiarizing artists' work. For example, copy editors will continue to copyedit the titles of artists' works, but they will not monitor or correct the AI's copyediting 'work.'
Under all circumstances, we will only employ human audiobook narrators, not “narrators” generated by AI tools that have been built using narrators’ voices for training without permission.

As authors, we intend to reflect these beliefs as much as possible in our future contracts with publishers.

We call on publishers to publicly stand up for our authors against the theft of our art and the low-quality AI-generated works that profit from it. This is not just about us who are currently publishing. Whether we can continue publishing or not, we believe it is our duty to provide more space for up-and-coming authors who continue to hone their craft, dreaming of one day publishing their work and getting a fair share of compensation. We need publishers' voices, just as we have always needed artists' voices. We ask you to be the ones to protect the future of our work and future works.

We look forward to hearing from you.

According to NPR, the open letter had been signed by more than 1,100 people within 24 hours of its publication, including Jodi Picoult , Olivie Blake , and Paul Tremblay .