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:
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