Stories about authors using AI<\/a>, which have begun to steadily emerge as the software becomes more mainstream, are often met with incredulity. Most shocking was a report in March by The New York Times that one author\u2019s buzzy horror novel, titled Shy Girl, would be pulled by a major publisher after it found purported use of AI<\/a>. Its author, Mia Ballard, has denied personally using AI to write the novel, telling The New York Times that an acquaintance she had hired to work on an early self-published version had incorporated AI tools. The US newspaper shortly after cut ties with a freelance journalist<\/a> after discovering he had used AI to help write a book review. <\/p>\n Months later, controversy struck the literary magazine Granta after an AI detection platform suggested that the winner of its short story competition was the suspected product of AI<\/a>. Olga Tokarczuk, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, caused controversy when, during an onstage interview, she revealed she asks the machine \u2013 which she affectionately referred to as \u201cdarling\u201d \u2013 for help in developing the characters of her novels, asking it what sort of music they would listen to. Such was the backlash that she issued a subsequent statement insisting she used the technology solely for research.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy enough to see why writers would be seduced by AI. Need a synonym? Ask AI. Stuck on how to finish a sentence? Ask AI. On a deadline? AI can help with that. But for many writers, AI is also an existential threat, one they believe endangers their livelihood. A Cambridge study<\/a> last year found that more than half of UK novelists believe AI will replace their work as fiction writers. <\/p>\n The headlines are damning, suggesting AI and authors just don\u2019t go together. But the same study showed that a third of surveyed UK novelists are already using generative AI in their writing process \u2013 and that\u2019s just the ones who admit to it. The genie is out of the bottle, but admitting to using these tools in any way at all is still a taboo for authors. But must it be this way? Is there another world in which AI can be harnessed to help rather than harm the book\u2019s world?<\/p>\n Some authors think so. Anthony Horowitz<\/a>, the bestselling novelist and screenwriter behind the Alex Rider series and Midsomer Murders, is more optimistic than the dark material of his works might suggest. \u201cAI can be a wonderful friend\u2026 albeit a dangerous one,\u201d he warns. <\/p>\n The author made headlines in May<\/a> when he confessed to using ChatGPT \u201call the time\u201d as part of his process. Today, he is keen to clarify what part of the process that is. \u201cStrictly research,\u201d he says now. \u201cI would never put two words from AI next to one another.\u201d Horowitz is not embarrassed to use AI in this way. \u201cI have absolutely no shame about using it at all,\u201d he says. \u201cIt would be crazy to give up an incredible resource.\u201d <\/p>\n Crucially, it is never his only resource. Partway through our call, Horowitz excuses himself to answer the door for a package. The parcel that arrives is, in fact, germane to our conversation: a copy of Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945 by Ian Baruma. It\u2019s one of dozens of non-fiction books<\/a> that Horowitz is reading for his new historical fiction novel. \u201cMy first source of knowledge and information is still books<\/a>,\u201d he says. \u201cI could swing the camera around and show you all the books I\u2019ve read so far.\u201d <\/p>\n Horowitz reads me a passage from his forthcoming novel, about a woman and boy arriving into Croydon Aerodrome. \u201cAI told me first of all that Croydon Aerodrome was the name of the airport on 1933, when this is set, and it also told me that a passenger would get off the plane and go first into a medical station where they\u2019d look for illnesses being imported from other countries,\u201d he says. \u201cThose are two things I got from AI. The description of the passport? I got that from a book. And the rest of it, the connection between mother and son, that\u2019s just me. So you see, even in that little chunk, you have three sources: AI, books, and me as a writer.\u201d <\/p>\n Horowitz fact-checks all the information AI gives him. He was reminded of technology\u2019s fallibility when he asked it for the plot of one of his novels. \u201cIt gave me the wrong one. I thought, wow, if a heart surgeon was using AI to find the lower ventricle\u2026 what sort of world would we be living in?\u201d <\/p>\n Part of why AI is so contentious a subject in the literary world is because many AI models have been trained, without permission, on the work of authors. In March, around 10,000 authors, including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, and Richard Osman co-published an \u201cempty\u201d book in protest over AI using their work<\/a>. Earlier this year, five major publishers, including Hachette and Macmillan, sued Meta for copyright over allegations<\/a> that millions of works from novels to textbooks were pirated to train their Llama AI model. Meta has denied any wrongdoing. <\/p>\n Horowitz expects his novels have been used to train AI models. You might think that using AI makes him complicit in the theft of his own work, but he isn\u2019t losing sleep over it. \u201cIf you ran your life that way, you wouldn\u2019t eat anything. You wouldn\u2019t wear anything. You wouldn\u2019t really do anything because every single thing that we have around us is in some way compromised. And that is the world we live in,\u201d he says, but adds that he has \u201cenormous sympathy\u201d for his fellow authors in the same position. <\/p>\n He is also not bothered by the rumours that AI authors could replace humans altogether. \u201cTo me that\u2019s not a great concern because AI can\u2019t do it as well as I can,\u201d he says simply. \u201cWe are better than AI.\u201d <\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t lend a helping hand. Journalist and author Katie Prescott also found AI invaluable in writing her bestselling biography The Curious Case of Mike Lynch: The Improbable Life & Death of a Tech Billionaire, about the late British tech entrepreneur and founder of AI-pioneering company Autonomy. Dubbed \u201cBritain\u2019s Bill Gates\u201d, Lynch\u2019s success was soured by allegations of massive accounting fraud that, in turn, sparked a decade of litigation and a gruelling trial in which he was acquitted of all fraud charges, only to die weeks later in an accident on his superyacht. <\/p>\n To me [AI replacing writers] is not a great concern because AI can\u2019t do it as well as I can. We are better than AI<\/p>\n Anthony Horowitz, author<\/p>\n \u201cI was really, really lucky to have AI,\u201d Prescott says. \u201cI was under enormous time pressure and facing mountains of information, something like 2,000 pages of very complex accounting judgement. And underpinning that judgement were transcripts from one of the most lengthy and complex trials in British legal history.\u201d To help, Prescott loaded her sources into Google NotebookLM \u2013 an AI tool that operates like a particularly intelligent personal research assistant. Ask it anything you want about what you uploaded and you\u2019ll get an accurate answer. It can even turn the contents of your documents into a shockingly realistic podcast. <\/p>\n NotebookLM allowed Prescott to discover the minutiae in these documents \u2013 little nuggets of industry gossip that she would likely have never found otherwise. Like a particularly strange Winnie the Pooh-themed presentation that Lynch and his team gave. The LM found mentions of it in three seemingly throwaway references in transcripts of interviews with smaller players in the trial, ones that Prescott might not have necessarily read end to end. \u201cIt\u2019s not something you\u2019d have found if you were regularly keyword searching,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n In reviews of her book, Prescott\u2019s research is described as \u201cmeticulous\u201d. The lawyers, on both sides of the trial, were frankly in awe of the pace at which she was able to digest and parse the insurmountable amounts of information presented to her. \u201cTheir memory of the case is walls and walls and walls of files,\u201d says Prescott. \u201cJunior lawyers having to go to the right file to find the right piece of information. They said it took them 10 years.\u201d <\/p>\n Like Horowitz, though, the AI is only additive to Prescott\u2019s work; it is not a replacement. \u201cIt\u2019s a tool. It\u2019s not going to do my job for me,\u201d she says. \u201cYou obviously can\u2019t write a book just from information. You can only do that by speaking to people; it took an awful lot of trust-building, my connections as a tech journalist, signing NDAs, everything that is basic bread and butter journalism. The stuff that AI can\u2019t do.\u201d <\/p>\n Both Horowitz and Prescott are clear about the fact that neither use it for creative purposes, drawing the line at research and organisation. But some authors are also curious about AI\u2019s imaginative capabilities. The crime author Ajay Chowdhury, best known for his globe-trotting Kamil Rahman series, was experimenting with AI in his work as early as 2023. Today, he estimates he uses AI more than ever. <\/p>\n More than simply research, which he does use it for as well, AI provides Choudhury with an initial copy editor and a sounding board \u2013 someone, or something, to bounce ideas off. \u201cI think of it as an editor on demand,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I\u2019ll have the kind of dialogue that I might have with my real editor: \u2018Look, I\u2019m a bit stuck here, what do you think I should do?\u2019 and then we\u2019d bat some ideas around. Now 95 per cent of what comes up I\u2019ll discard but occasionally it\u2019ll come up with something that sparks an idea of a direction that I could go in.\u201d <\/p>\n While Chowdhury does not use AI for writing his novels \u2013 \u201cnumber one, I don\u2019t think it writes very well and number two, well what\u2019s the point?\u201d \u2013 he has used ChatGPT to generate potential outcomes for certain scenes like, say, how a captive might escape a killer\u2019s trap using only fertiliser and gardening tools. He\u2019s used it to restructure sections to help with pacing and used an image generator site to help spark his imagination. He asks it for feedback, careful to phrase his request as such so that its response is honest rather than obsequious (chatbots famously have a confirmation bias that makes them overly flattering). And most of the time the feedback he received is in line with what his editor at Penguin will say. \u201cThough my real editor is obviously better!\u201d For Chowdury, a lot of it is about making the writing process more efficient.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that Chodhury and Prescott both have backgrounds in tech, which might account for their confidence in embracing these tools. Perhaps the suspicion around authors using AI points to a larger distrust over what this technology is, and what it means for creative work. It also raises questions about the bypassing of the creative process \u2013 something that has always been regarded as inherently human. But what is clear is that AI isn\u2019t going away anytime soon. Some writers continue to avoid it altogether; others will adapt on terms they\u2019re still in the process of defining. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-647259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Bestselling](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/01KQVPEFQ7DT2RTMBY76HZ9D6H.jpg\")
Bestselling author Anthony Horowitz: \u2018AI can be a wonderful friend\u2026 albeit a dangerous one\u2019 (Alamy\/PA)<\/p>\n![\"In](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Book_front_cover_2-(1)-copy.jpg\")
In March, around 10,000 authors, including Richard Osman and Kazuo Ishiguro, publish \u2018empty book\u2019 in protest of AI using their work (PR Handout)<\/p>\n![\"Authors](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Artificial-intelligence-protest-k4p8fsct.jpeg\")
Authors and publishing creatives from across the UK gather near the offices of Meta in London to demand immediate answers from Meta bosses, after millions of books were allegedly used to train their artificial intelligence (PA)<\/p>\n![\"Katie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2218626307.jpeg\")
Katie Prescott counted herself \u2018very lucky\u2019 to have AI when facing thousands of pages of transcripts and mountains of information when writing her biography \u2018The Curious Case of Mike Lynch\u2019 (Getty)<\/p>\n![\"To](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/HCpw-2lWwAEjjW9-copy.jpeg\")
To the award-winning crime writer Ajay Choudhury, ChatGPT functions like \u2018an editor on demand\u2019 (X\/@ajaychow)<\/p>\n