Report: HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette quietly use AI for book copy
WIRED reported on October 9 that workers at three of the Big Five US publishers—HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette—say the companies have been quietly using LLMs such as Claude and ChatGPT for publicity copy, back-cover text, cover art, marketing materials and emails to literary agents, without public disclosure or author consent. More than two dozen anonymous staff told WIRED that HarperCollins bought Claude licenses from Anthropic and assigned dozens of employees as "AI Champions," later adding ChatGPT and the marketing platform Jasper; Simon & Schuster hosted an OpenAI workshop that suggested using ChatGPT to write to agents and ran a 2024 internal AI use-case contest with a $10,000 prize. Simon & Schuster employees signed an open letter opposing a trial of Skan AI's Blueprint workflow-monitoring tool, and CEO Greg Greeley said in an October 6 memo that no decision had been made; Hachette said it supports AI for operational uses but not creative work, Simon & Schuster said access is limited to vetted enterprise tools, and HarperCollins did not respond.
The episode shows generative AI slipping into the core workflows of content businesses while staff and authors have little say over its scope or disclosure.