Bloomsbury Publishing, the British publisher behind the Harry Potter series, has said it does not want its books written by artificial intelligence and rejected the idea that the industry will inevitably have to accept the technology in fiction and non-fiction.
Nigel Newton, executive chairman of the FTSE 250 company, said the publisher opposed the use of AI to write books, but conceded that its use was becoming “very difficult” to detect as the technology grows more sophisticated.
“We recognise the huge value of AI as a research enabler but we do not want our books written by AI,” he said.
“Editors are our radar and our early warning system. There is no current perfect solution. At the end of day it’s down to our authors … wanting to tell a story that they are passionate about. It certainly isn’t going to enhance their reputation if they’re accused of plagiarism via AI or any other route.”
Asked whether publishers would eventually accept AI in fiction and non-fiction, Newton said he did not think it was “inevitable”.
His comments come after the launch of a new literary prize for the best work of fiction written by an author alongside their AI agent. The Prix Pascal de Littérature IA is named after Blaise Pascal, who invented the first mechanical calculating machine.
The prize follows accusations that AI had been used to write works submitted by finalists and winners of several prestigious literary awards this year, including the Commonwealth Short Story prize.
In July, Bloomsbury announced that it would be among the beneficiaries of a $1.5bn settlement with Anthropic, the American company behind the Claude chatbot. The class action concerned Anthropic training its AI models on copyrighted books it had not purchased. The settlement is the largest known copyright payout in US history.
More than 14,000 Bloomsbury titles are included, equating to about $3,000 per title. In a stock market announcement on 22 July, the company said the sum per work would be split equally between author and publisher after legal fees, with payments expected to start in the second half of its financial year. Bloomsbury said it had submitted its claims and was working through the settlement process.
Newton said that, as a member of the American and UK publishers’ trade associations, Bloomsbury was among those pursuing other large technology companies over the scraping of its books to train large language models.
“The sort of sums they have to pay for training rights rather than seizing them for free are relatively small in the context of the scale at which the tech companies are operating,” he said.
The dispute over how AI developers use copyrighted works has also played out in the UK, where publishers have pressed ministers to protect authors’ intellectual property. In its report on copyright and artificial intelligence, published on 18 March, the government said a broad copyright exception for AI training with an opt-out for rights holders was no longer its preferred approach, and that it did not propose to intervene in the licensing market at this stage.
Newton, who signed the then-unknown JK Rowling to Bloomsbury in 1996, stepped back as chief executive this year to become executive chairman. He is set to remain an executive until 2031. He said the company kept a constant list of potential internal and external candidates for chief executive but had not formally started the appointment process.
Bloomsbury reported revenue of £152m and pre-tax profit of £9.3m for the first half of the year, down from £160m and £18.3m a year earlier.
The company maintained its guidance for record profits this year, supported by releases in the second half, including two new books from Sarah J Maas and the latest instalment in Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures series.
Newton said Bloomsbury expected a lift from the debut of HBO’s Harry Potter television series on 25 December. “Harry Potter will take over the family Christmas this year, and a whole new or even possibly several new generations of readers will be introduced to the series for the first time as a result of seeing the [show],” he said.
