‘It’s like the wild west’: how AI has rocked the literary world

Hart started self-publishing in 2012 before moving into full-time work three years later. She sells her books on Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that rewards prolific writers with higher visibility.

The platform’s algorithm favours authors who can release a new book at least once a month. Hart knows of writers who hire more than a dozen ghostwriters to keep pace.

She can write 10,000 words a day on her own, but AI allows her to produce many more. Since 2025, she has written 370 novels under 21 pen names, earning herself high six figures.

AI use and backlash

A study led by Tuhin Chakrabarty of Stony Brook University estimates that around one fifth of recently self-published books contain at least 25% AI-generated text.

Hart teaches courses on how to use AI to produce books. Unless disclosing the use of AI becomes a legal requirement, she advises other authors not to do so because of the public response.

The minute someone discloses [AI use] they get death threats, they get called names, they’re ousted. Hart is one of her pen names. After she talked to the New York Times earlier this year she was doxed and faced death threats.

I think the anger and hate comes from a place of fear. In the literary world, many people fear the tech will undercut and replace them. I think people are very afraid of AI, and people in publishing are delusional in thinking that it’s not going to overtake our industry.

Legal and ethical concerns

The anger also stems from the training data used by large language models. If they can spit out books that people want to read or produce a convincing pastiche of a favourite writer, it is almost certainly because they were trained on established writers’ stolen work.

Last year, a class action lawsuit involving around 500,000 titles won a $1.5bn settlement from the AI firm Anthropic for alleged use of the writers’ work without consent. Other similar lawsuits are ongoing.

Many writers oppose AI for both moral and aesthetic reasons. One group of 70 prominent authors wrote an open letter calling on the big five publishers to promise that they will never release books that were created by a machine. The publishers did not promise.

Industry in flux

A literary agent told the Guardian that when it comes to AI, the atmosphere in mainstream publishing is like the wild west. The technology is outpacing the industry’s capacity to reckon with what it means that authors can – and already are – using AI to write their books.

We’re at a time where it’s all very much in flux, and I don’t think anyone has good answers – but certainly everyone’s talking about it, says Liz Gately, a New York-based book scout.