More than 70 authors including Dennis Lehane, Gregory Maguire, and Lauren Groff are pushing back against AI in publishing. They dropped an open letter on Lit Hub demanding that publishers never release AI-created books.
The letter targets the "big five" U.S. publishing giants—Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan—as well as other publishers. The petition linked to the letter hit over 1,100 signatures within 24 hours, including from Jodi Picoult, Olivie Blake, and Paul Tremblay.
The authors want publishers to stop using AI trained on copyrighted works without authors’ consent or pay. They want no replacing of publishing employees with AI tools and insist only humans narrate audiobooks. 
The letter cuts straight to the point:
"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," the letter states.
"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."
So far, authors mostly fought AI through lawsuits against AI companies. Big names like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman are involved in cases against AI firms. But recent rulings sided with AI companies like Anthropic and Meta, allowing the use of copyrighted works in AI training under fair use—if the works are legally obtained.
Rioghnach Robinson (pen name Riley Redgate), a letter organizer, says these rulings make the petition urgent.
"With courts allowing AI access to copyrighted texts as fair use, the next — and possibly last — line of defense has to be the publishers," Robinson said.
"Without publishers pledging not to generate internally competitive titles, nothing’s stopping publishing houses from AI-generating their authors out of existence. We’re hopeful that publishers will act to protect authors and industry workers from, specifically, the competitive and labor-related threats of AI."
Besides copyright, authors warn about fake AI-generated books piggybacking on real authors on Amazon. They’re also worried about AI narration overtaking human audiobook narrators—Audible recently announced expanding AI narration and translation for publishers.
Audible CEO Bob Carrigan said:
"Audible believes that AI represents a momentous opportunity to expand the availability of audiobooks with the vision of offering customers every book in every language, alongside our continued investments in premium original content,"
"We’ll be able to bring more stories to life — helping creators reach new audiences while ensuring listeners worldwide can access extraordinary books that might otherwise never reach their ears."
Robinson acknowledges some progress.
"Many individual contracts now have AI opt-out clauses in an attempt to keep books out of AI training datasets, which is great," she said.
"But publishers should be doing much more to defend their writers against the onslaught of AI. There are major concerns that publishers might create generative AI titles of their own that could swallow the publishing landscape, or replace editorial workers with AI tools, or the like."
Only Simon & Schuster responded to NPR ahead of this report.
"Simon & Schuster takes these concerns seriously," spokesperson Susannah Lawrence said.
"We are actively engaged in protecting the intellectual property rights of our authors."
Authors want publishers to step up. The AI wave is already hitting publishing. Now they want rules to stop it from washing away their livelihoods.
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