A prominent group of authors, including Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, R.F. Kuang, Dennis Lehane, and Geoffrey Maguire, has issued an open letter urging book publishers to limit their reliance on artificial intelligence technologies. Specifically, the writers call for assurances that publishers will continue to hire exclusively human narrators for audiobooks and pledge never to release books authored by machine-generated systems.
Their collective appeal maintains that the extensive use of AI tools amounts to appropriation of writers’ labor without compensation, asserting that “Rather than paying writers a small percentage of the money our work makes for them, someone else will be paid for a technology built on our unpaid labor.”
Additionally, the authors have requested publishers to commit not only to refraining from machine-authored book releases but also to avoiding the replacement of human employees with AI solutions, or diminishing existing staff responsibilities to merely overseeing automated operations.
The open letter initially gathered the signatures of several prominent authors, but according to further reports, it received additional endorsements from over 1,100 writers within just 24 hours following its publication.
This collective action by authors coincides with ongoing litigation in which writers are suing technology companies accused of improper use of their books to train artificial intelligence models. However, these lawsuits recently faced notable setbacks after federal judges issued rulings favoring the tech companies earlier this week.
