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In 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.
