Book Publishers Are Quietly Using More AI. Staff Are Revolting

LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyIn headline after headline this year, American book publishers have appeared to be fighting back against generative AI, from suing Google for copyright infringement to canceling books by authors suspected of using LLMs.

But behind the scenes, at least three of the Big Five US book publishers—HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette—have been quietly incorporating AI tools into their publishing processes without public disclosures or author consent.

According to interviews with more than two dozen workers, all of whom spoke under the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their employment, publishers are now using LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT to email literary agents, write publicity and back-cover copy, design cover art, and generate marketing materials, often at the direction of their executives.

At the same time, multiple editorial staffers say the widely publicized cases of authors accused of using LLMs to help write their books—like Hachette’s horror novel Shy Girl or Macmillan’s crime thriller Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body—are just the tip of the iceberg. “Every single imprint has a story of someone very esteemed who had a book canceled because of blatant AI use” without ever making the news, one editor says.

At HarperCollins senior leaders purchased Claude licenses from Anthropic months ago “but very quickly realized they didn’t know how to implement them,” according to a current employee. Dozens of junior- and senior-level staff were then “voluntold” to become “AI Champions” and were tasked with discovering use cases in monthly brainstorming sessions with staff across the company.

This spring, when some HarperCollins employees expressed concerns about the legal, ethical, and environmental impacts of AI at one of these brainstorming sessions, a person leading the meeting dismissed their qualms as “the cost of doing business,” according to someone who attended the meeting. Soon after, a statement was added to the new AI section of the HarperCollins online employee portal, noting that “while AI does have an environmental impact, it’s a small part of most individuals’ total digital carbon footprint.”

Some HarperCollins staffers were unnerved by the brainstorming sessions. “It was such a slap in the face,” says one employee. “We’ve been making valid business cases for years to be paid a healthy salary, and instead they spent that money on software that most of us don’t really want.” (The average entry-level salary for New York City publishing employees at the Big Five and Scholastic was $47,583 in 2023.) In addition to Claude, staffers say HarperCollins has also purchased licenses for ChatGPT and Jasper, an agentic platform that promises “to run end-to-end marketing workflows.”

At least one HarperCollins division has been “all in” on AI since gaining software licenses, according to one staffer, including AI-generated marketing videos. But according to workers at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette, one of the most common use cases for LLMs so far is generating publicity copy.

Readers encounter publicity copy everywhere from Amazon and Goodreads to back covers, and it’s used to pitch books to booksellers, journalists, content creators, and critics. However, “using AI to generate publicity copy is short-sighted,” a Big Five publicist tells me. “Publicists have a duty to engage in good faith with readers and our colleagues in the media, who I’m sure have a low threshold for tolerating AI-generated pitches.”

On the other hand, Meg Reid, publisher of the independent Hub City Press, says LLM-written marketing and publicity unfortunately “feels pretty inevitable” for the Big Five. “That’s one place we’re probably going to see a bigger shift between corporate publishers looking for efficiencies and smaller publishers insisting that the humans involved are the whole point.”

Meanwhile, earlier this year, literary agents began suspecting specific Big Five editors were using AI to write rejection letters. “Among colleagues, we compared emails on different books from the same editors, and they all had the same classic signs of AI writing, like ‘not this, but that’ and the rule of three,” one agent says. Employees at Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Hachette tell WIRED they believe the agents’ suspicions were correct.

A spokesperson for Hachette says the company “support[s] the use of AI tools for operational purposes, when they help our authors’ books reach more readers,” but that it “[does] not support creative uses of AI, including communicating with our authors and partners.”

Wibke Grutjen, global chief marketing and communications officer at Simon & Schuster, says “employees across all functions have access to a limited number of enterprise-level AI tools,” but using them is not mandatory. Grutjen said the company prohibits the use of any AI tool “that has not been vetted and approved” and that “the goal is always to free up more time for our employees to spend on deeper focus and creative work on behalf of and alongside our authors.”

HarperCollins did not respond to requests for comment.

Months ago, workers at Simon & Schuster attended a workshop with representatives from OpenAI. “The person leading the workshop genuinely had no idea what we did,” an attendee says, but one of the AI company’s recommendations for how to use ChatGPT in the book trade was, in fact, composing emails to literary agents. The practice has also grown among editors at HarperCollins and Hachette, employees say.