An open letter from authors including Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, RF kuang, Dennis Lehane and Geoffrey Maguire called on book publishers to commit to limiting their use of AI tools, for example, audiobook narrators who only promise to hire only humans.
The letter argues that the author’s work has been “stolen” by AI companies: “rather than paying writers a small portion of the money we make in our work, we pay for technology built on our unpaid labor.”
Among other commitments, the authors call on publishers to “make books that guarantee they will never release machine-created” instead of “not replacing human employees with AI tools and not lowering their positions to AI monitors.”
While the first signing of the initials was the already impressive list of writers, NPR reported an additional 1,100 signatures were added within 24 hours of its initial publication.
The authors also sued tech companies for using books to train AI models, but federal judges dealt a major blow to the lawsuits earlier this week.
