To Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and all other publishers of America:
We are standing on a precipice.
At its 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 quickly, cheaply, and on demand. We are rushing toward a future where our novels, our biographies, our poems and our memoirs—our records of the human experience—are “written” by artificial intelligence models that, by definition, cannot know what it is to be human. To bleed, or starve, or love.
AI may give the appearance of understanding our humanity, but the truth is, only a human being can speak to and understand another human being. Every time a prompt is entered into AI, the language that bot uses to respond was created in part through the synthesis of art that we, the undersigned, have spent our careers crafting. Taken without our consent, without payment, without even the courtesy of acknowledgment.
In our writing, we drew on our lives: the losses of our parents, the births of our children, every love affair we’ve lived or imagined. Stories of human heroism and human depravity. These stories were stolen from us and used to train machines that, if short-sighted capitalistic greed wins, could soon be generating the books that fill our bookstores. Is this the end goal—to fully remove us from the equation so that those at the very top of the capitalist structure can profit even further off our labor than they already do? 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.
The purveyors of AI have stolen our work from us and from our publishers, too.The writing that AI produces feels cheap because it is cheap. It feels simple because it is simple to produce. That is the whole point. AI is an enormously powerful tool, here to stay, with the capacity for real societal benefits—but the replacement of art and artists isn’t one of them.
The purveyors of AI have stolen our work from us and from our publishers, too. The hard-working editors and copy-editors and publicists and publishers that cared for and developed and launched the books we’ve written? Their jobs are also in jeopardy, which means that book publishing as an art form—a collaborative art form, nurtured at every stage by the personal touch of a human being—is in jeopardy, too. The audiobook narrators who have breathed life into our stories have already been sidelined by cheaper, simpler AI imitators. To add insult to injury, use of AI has devastating environmental effects, using great amounts of energy and potable water. What happens next?
We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines. To pledge that they will not replace their human staff with AI tools or degrade their positions into AI monitors.
We call on our publishers to pledge the following:
• We will not openly or secretly publish books that were written using the AI tools that stole from our authors.
• We will not invent “authors” to promote AI-generated books or allow human authors to use pseudonyms to publish AI-generated books that were built on the stolen work of our authors.
• We will not use AI built on the stolen work of artists to design any part of the books we release.
• We will not replace any of our employees wholly or partially with AI tools.
• We will not create new positions that will oversee the production of writing or art generated by the AI built on the stolen work of artists.
• We will not rewrite our current employees’ job descriptions to retrofit their positions into monitors for the AI built on the stolen work of artists. For example: copy-editors will continue copy-editing their titles, not monitoring and correcting an AI’s copy-editing “work.”
• In all circumstances, we will only hire human audiobook narrators, rather than “narrators” generated by AI tools that were built on stolen voices.
As authors, our future contracts with publishers will reflect these beliefs to every extent possible.
We call on publishers to take a public stand for their authors against the theft of our art and the debased AI work that profits from that theft. This isn’t just about those of us who are publishing today. Regardless of whether we are able to keep publishing or not, we also believe it’s our duty to make more space for those new writers out there honing their craft, hoping to someday share their work—and be fairly compensated for it. We will need their voices, like we’ve always needed the voices of artists. We want you to be guardians of the future of our work and the work of generations to come.
We await your response.
We, the undersigned:
Samira Ahmed
Becky Albertalli
Tom Angleberger
David Arnold
Victoria Aveyard
Leigh Bardugo
Cece Bell
Chloe Benjamin
James Bird
Holly Black
Alexandra Bracken
Brittany Cavallaro
Cassandra Clare
Susan Dennard
Benjamin Dreyer
Aja Gabel
Stephanie Garber
Lamar Giles
Chloe Gong
Lauren Groff
Lev Grossman
Jasmine Guillory
Ali Hazelwood
Emily Henry
Joanna Ho
Colleen Hoover
Silas House
Vanessa Hua
Tiffany D. Jackson
Abby Jimenez
R.F. Kuang
Yulin Kuang
R.O. Kwon
Christina Lauren
Mackenzi Lee
Dennis Lehane
Ann Liang
E. Lockhart
Gregory Maguire
Adriana Mather
Jennifer Niven
Matt de la Peña
Stephanie Perkins
Jacques J. Rancourt
justin a. reynolds
Randy Ribay
Rioghnach Robinson
Rebecca Ross
Veronica Roth
Rainbow Rowell
Karen Russell
Kennedy Ryan
Aisha Saeed
Dana Schwartz
Adam Silvera
Julie Soto
Nic Stone
Emma Straub
Courtney Summers
Jesse Q. Sutanto
Emily Temple
Amy Tintera
Corey Van Landingham
Jasmine Warga
Brynne Weaver
Chuck Wendig
Julia Whelan
Kiersten White
Tia Williams
Jeff Zentner
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