The novel has endured the industrial revolution, radio, television and the internet. Now it faces a new challenger: artificial intelligence. According to a new survey, 51 percent of novelists fear they will be replaced by AI entirely, even though most do not use the technology themselves.
The study, conducted by the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, surveyed 258 published novelists and 74 industry insiders on how AI is viewed in British fiction. It found widespread anxiety about future earnings, with 85 percent saying AI will negatively affect their income and 39 percent saying it already has.
Bestselling author Tracy Chevalier, known for Girl With a Pearl Earring and The Glassmaker, said she worries a profit-driven publishing industry may turn increasingly to AI-generated books. She warned that if AI-produced novels are cheaper and faster to make, publishers may favor them, just as consumers often choose machine-made goods over handcrafted ones.
Many respondents said they have already experienced income losses due to competition from AI-generated books and the decline of supplementary work such as copywriting. Some also reported finding AI-generated imitations of their books, including titles published under their names without their involvement.
The Authors Guild has warned that access to AI tools is fueling a surge of low-quality, AI-generated books on Amazon. In response, Amazon has limited the number of daily uploads to its Kindle self-publishing platform.
Copyright issues also loom large. Fifty-nine percent of novelists surveyed said their work had been used to train AI models, and nearly all said they did not consent or receive compensation. Earlier this year, AI firm Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit over the unauthorized use of books for training. While the court ruled that training AI models is comparable to a human reading a book for inspiration, it found that Anthropic knowingly downloaded pirated copies and ordered compensation.
Despite the concerns, a minority of authors said AI can be a useful creative tool. One example in the report was Lizbeth Crawford, who writes in multiple genres. She uses AI to spot plot holes and streamline editing, increasing her output from one novel per year to three, with a target of five.
Even so, the report’s foreword calls for the government to strengthen copyright protections. Proposed changes to UK law would allow exceptions for text and data mining, which critics say would force authors to opt out to prevent their work from being used to train AI. Professor Gina Neff, executive director of the Minderoo Centre, said the approach favors global tech companies at the expense of UK creative industries.
A government spokesperson said officials remain committed to protecting citizens and businesses while engaging with the creative and AI sectors to shape the country’s next steps.
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