Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory, Richard Osman, and ~10K writers publish Don't Steal This Book, an “empty” book to protest AI companies using their work
For authors, the dispute has moved from isolated objections—such as the backlash that led Prosecraft to shut down—toward large, visible collective action around compensation and permission.
First-order effects
The book gives roughly 10,000 participating writers a shared public vehicle to contest AI companies’ use of their work, concentrating attention on copyright and consent.
AI companies and policymakers face a more prominent authors’ campaign, while the named writers attach their reputations to a common negotiating position.
Second-order effects
Publishers, writer groups and other creative sectors gain a reusable protest format and added incentive to coordinate rather than pursue the issue separately.
If cross-sector campaigns continue to converge, access to creative works for AI development is more likely to be treated as a licensing and bargaining question rather than a unilateral data-collection practice.
The key structural uncertainty is whether public campaigns translate into negotiated licensing norms or chiefly remain pressure on governments considering copyright exceptions, as seen in the coalition opposing a UK training exemption.
The trend: Creative industries are increasingly coordinating public copyright campaigns to shape the terms under which AI systems can use protected work.
Today, we're publishing Don't Steal This Book - a (mostly) empty book from almost 10,000 authors, protesting the theft of their work by AI companies. The UK government is considering upending copyright law to benefit AI companies. Don't Steal This Book urges them not to. Apart [i…
Something I can't get over is for all the talk about how revolutionary AI is, what would also be revolutionary is just removing copyright for everything. — Imagine what everyone would create with that!
As we wait to hear from Ministers next week on copyright + AI, we support the ‘empty book’ campaign signed by thousands of authors, which shows the depth of feeling across the UK creative industries about the large-scale theft of writers' work — www.theguardian.com/technology/ …
“This is not a victimless crime - generative AI competes with the people whose work it is trained on, robbing them of their livelihoods. The government must protect the UK's creatives, and refuse to legalise the theft of creative work by AI companies.” — www.theguardian.com/te…
This is a protest not just against gen AI training generally, but against the UK government's proposal to allow AI companies to train on copyright-protected work unless the author/artist opts out — www.theguardian.com/technology/ 2...