HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster quietly hand book copy to chatbots

Three of the five biggest publishers in the United States are using ChatGPT and Claude to write the text readers see on book jackets, Amazon listings and Goodreads pages, according to a WIRED investigation. More than two dozen employees at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette described chatbots drafting publicity copy, emails to literary agents, marketing videos and even cover art, without public disclosure or the consent of the authors involved.

The contrast is what stings. In public, publishing has cast itself as one of the loudest opponents of generative AI, suing over copyright and cancelling books whose authors were suspected of letting a language model do the writing. Inside the same industry, the tools have become ordinary office software, and the person who picks up a novel because of its back-cover pitch has no way of knowing who, or what, wrote that pitch.

At HarperCollins, senior leaders bought Claude licences from Anthropic and then, according to a current employee, struggled to work out what to do with them. Dozens of staff were drafted as “AI Champions” and asked to find uses in monthly brainstorming sessions. The company also pays for ChatGPT and for Jasper, a platform that promises to run marketing workflows from start to finish, and one division has gone “all in”, including AI-generated marketing videos.

At Simon & Schuster, representatives from OpenAI ran a workshop for staff and suggested ChatGPT for composing emails to literary agents. Agents, for their part, began comparing rejection letters from the same editors and spotting the same stock phrasing, the contrast constructions and lists of three that give machine prose away. Employees at all three houses told WIRED they believe the agents guessed right.

The practice that worries agents most is what goes into the chatbots. Some have added clauses to their contracts barring an author’s material from being run through a large language model, because a manuscript pasted into a consumer chatbot leaves the publisher’s systems and lands on an AI company’s servers. One HarperCollins source said editors who asked whether they could paste a full manuscript into such a tool were told no by the legal team. That rule came from the legal department and has never been published for the people who wrote the books.

Translation is the next pressure point, and it matters well beyond the United States. HarperCollins chief executive Brian Murray has said AI could help the company publish more translated books and audiobooks, and editors told WIRED they have seen machine-translated manuscripts, labelled as such, offered for sale at the Frankfurt and London book fairs, where publishers buy the rights to foreign titles. Every edition that crosses a border passes through that market.

The companies describe something narrower. Hachette said it supports AI “for operational purposes” but not creative uses, including communication with authors and partners. Simon & Schuster said staff can use a limited set of vetted enterprise tools and that nobody is required to. The reporting rests largely on anonymous accounts, the suspicions about rejection letters come from stylistic tells rather than proof, and AI-detection software is far from reliable. What nobody disputes is the gap at the centre of the story: none of the three publishers has told readers or authors which covers, blurbs or pitches involved AI.

Several employees describe the shift as exhaustion more than enthusiasm. Layoffs have cut some teams to five or six people handling two or three times as many titles, one worker told WIRED, and a chatbot is the shortcut management keeps offering.

The friction went public this month. Simon & Schuster staff circulated an open letter to chief executive Greg Greeley, the former Amazon executive who took over in March, opposing a trial of Skan AI, a workflow-monitoring and automation tool that employees linked to KKR, the investment firm that bought the publisher in 2023. On October 6, Greeley told staff the company had explored the product but that no decision had been made to use it or any similar monitoring tool.

Agents and editors are asking for something modest: clear rules on what is used, and when. At HarperCollins, one staffer said, there has been no guidance at all on what to tell authors, and the staffer believes management knows the honest answer would start an uproar.

Tags: Claude, chatgpt, Generative AI, Hachette, HarperCollins, publishing