2w ago

Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and all other publishers of America

Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Publishers

“We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”

Literature @beehaw.org

alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org

2w ago

Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Publishers

lithub.com /against-ai-an-open-letter-from-writers-to-publishers/

Technology @programming.dev

Pro @programming.dev

2w ago

Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and all other publishers of America

lithub.com /against-ai-an-open-letter-from-writers-to-publishers/

33 comments

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If there's money to be made by releasing books created by Counterfeit Cognizance, those publishers will take advantage of it to its fullest... Count on it.
Nice try, but...
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- Unless readers want street cred reading only books from publishers who observe the request. There will be a market for "authentic" publishers along with the more liberal slop-friendly ones.
- Your points don't get better just because you coined/found a new term
  
  Aaannd...
  Yours don't improve by you being a jackass. But, doing so will earn you a quick block. Bye.
It's too early for the Butlerian Jihad to start.
Cute, but we all know the only way these writers are going to get what they want is if they part ways from their current publishers and start a coöperative.
- It’s actually wild how with the just-in-time economy, it has never required less capital investment to start a business like a book publisher. And yet it seems like the only people that take advantage of it are average schmo “grindset grifters” selling junk while all of the people with the real economic power literally beg the institutions that have abused them since the very beginning of their industry to please do the right thing.
  
  I tried to read about "just-in-time economy" but I really don't see how it would apply to book market?
  
  I'd take it part of the problem is that publisher is quite a "unglorious" job to say somehow. Like, it's difficult to make it look fancy or interesting enough that you'd take effort, time and resources from other things you could be doing - such as, ya know, writing the story you want to write - to have to do that.
- Is that like a cooperative but in germany?
  
  Oh it's for the correct sound distinction. Compare naïve vs naive (eg.: glaive).
- And I don’t care if something is written by AI. As people we care about the quality of the output.
  We know AI by default just creates slop but with a human in the loop, it’s possible to get inspiration for scenes, brainstorming, discuss ideas etc.
  I think a good writer would use it this way.
  
  AI is much like smoking (hey, it is killing the atmosphere! ). Even if a good writer uses it, the usage itseld can still cause harm for others.
And demand an additional disclaimer that "use of the contents of this book for AI training purposes is explicitely forbidden".
- That will 100% stop Meta from using it for training their AI for sure.
  /s
  
  It will at least stop AI training from claiming fair use.
If they don't then someone else will.
- That’s Game Theory right there.
That's not how capitalism works my friend
- How does it exactly relate here?
I see this as the 2025 equivalent of the entertainment industry's collective backlash against Napster back in the day. The issue will probably be decided by courts and legislatures, as before, and that legal decision will be transmuted into fierce morality, as before. The major difference is that in 1999 the legal combatants were a whole industry vs a handful of software developers and basically Lawrence Lessig, whereas with AI they're all corporations with tons of money at stake. So the outcome could easily be very different this time, and our crowdsourced moral standards could follow suit.
Everyone wants to protect their money under a capitalistic system. Where were you when all of the typewriter repairmen lost their jobs? Society and technology change and evolve over time.
- That's not an equivalency. From written paper to typewriters and then to computers, writing has remained a product of the author. A typewriter repair shop would transition from mechanical to electronic typewriters and potentially then to computer repair. This is because it supports an evolving technology.
  An author cannot transition to becoming a machine, because they cannot author what they don't write, but a publisher can continue to publish anything that would make them money. So when human experience is boiled down to nothing more than the probabalistic order of the words written by authors who gave no consent to have their work absorbed and mutilated by an LLM, the only winner is a publishing house seeking cheaper labour than the human.
- AI written books have no value.
  If it was not worth writing, it is not worth reading.

33 comments