Writers Against AI

When I was a child, I didn’t know any writers. Neither did my parents. I didn’t grow up in that kind of world. Before I was a teenager, I’m not sure I knew anyone who had been to a university, even; not that I was paying much attention anyway. I didn’t think those places were for the likes of us.

I was a reader though, thanks to my mum and dad. My mum used to read to me every night when I was young, and both my parents encouraged my love of books, which they shared. We didn’t live in the kind (or the size) of house that had a lot of bookshelves in it, but the public library solved that problem. Like most bookworms, I worked my way through it, discovering whole worlds I had never imagined were out there, both real and fantastical, and sometimes both at once.

This was in the suburbs of Greater London back in the seventies and eighties, which now seems like a very long time ago indeed. No personal computers, no mobile phones, no CCTV cameras, no 5G towers, obviously no Internet. Back then, our analogue tech was confined to buildings, and when you went out you were out. People looked at each other in cafes, and talked on buses. Books and the telly were where you got your stories from. Often the telly had got them from the books first.

Maybe the book was the only technology I ever really fell in love with. It is a technology, of course; so are words. Language - languages, since we have so many of them, though fewer than we once did - are one of the key markers of our humanity. We speak, we tell stories, we write the stories down and thus we are able to share them with people we will never meet and who will never meet us, but who will know us in some way by our words. Humans are storytelling animals if we are anything at all. All of our religions begin with stories, and all of our nations and cultures. Our personal biographies are stories we construct. We tell stories by naming everything else that lives. We tell stories about progress and decline, good and evil, kings and peasants, fairies and ghosts, detectives and serial killers. We sing stories to music, and record them and play them back again and again. We fight over stories, and we send our sons out to die for them.

I never imagined when I was a child that I would or could ever be ‘a writer.’ From where I was reading, in the small front bedroom of our 1930s semi, writers were mythical beings, like wizards or emperors. You knew they were out there somewhere, but you never met them. Still, I dreamed of one day having a book out with my name on. Perhaps if I became really famous, it might even have one of those instantly recognisable little Penguin logos on it, like so many of the paperbacks I read as a child, though this was too much really to hope for.

Well, here I am, four decades on, author of a book with a Penguin logo on - and, indeed, several books bearing the colophon of Faber & Faber, the other publisher which I dreamed (this time as a teenage author of terrible poems) might one day accept me into its hallowed halls. Here I am, and here we all are, but everything has changed, and is about to change further and faster and forever. Stories will keep being told, of course. It’s just that their authors might no longer be human.

I am talking, of course, about the rise of Artificial Intelligence. I have written before - here and in my recent book - about some of the implications of this rise as I see them, and I won’t rehash them now. But if you want a very recent software update, as it were, you could do worse than to refer to the writings of Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic AI. Anthropic is a Silicon Valley corporation dedicated to building intelligent machines, and Amodei has written two interconnected essays about them which are worth reading if you want to understand what is happening, and who is driving it.

The first, written in 2024, is entitled Machines of Loving Grace, and it is a paean to the wonderful, transformed world that AI could bring us. It is long and detailed, and if you swapped out the talk about computers with talk about pistons and steam, it could have been written by H. G. Wells in about 1890. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, you can skip to the conclusion, which informs us that ‘the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies [and] a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights’ are all within our reach. If we can just trust AI systems to do most of our work for us, these things can be achieved - hold your breath - ‘within the next 5 to10 years’.

Here in 2026, though, Dario is sounding a more sombre note. He still believes everything he wrote two years ago (or says he does), but two years is a long, long time in the world of AI. So, last month, he wrote a new essay - The Adolescence of Technology - this time taking a detailed look at AI’s possible downsides. His aim is to ‘map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them.’ That’s right: a battle plan. Why, you might ask, do we need to plan for battle against our potential saviours? And why is one of the people who is building them telling us to sharpen our swords? Are we facing a war against the machines already? Have we gone from H. G. Wells to Yevgeny Zamyatin in two short years?

Again, Amodei’s essay is long, but the conclusion is very different. He believes his company may only be a year away from a situation where its AIs are able to build new AIs themselves, autonomously, with no human instruction or intervention. These self-replicating AIs will be ‘smarter than all Nobel prize winners’, and will not be especially motivated to obey the humans around them. This is not a futurist fantasy: his company is already halfway through their construction, and working hard to complete it.

What will the results be? Amodei puts it like this:

Suppose a literal ‘country of geniuses’ were to materialize somewhere in the world in 2027. Imagine, say, 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist. The analogy is not perfect, because these geniuses could have an extremely wide range of motivations and behavior, from completely pliant and obedient, to strange and alien in their motivations. But sticking with the analogy for now, suppose you were the national security advisor of a major state, responsible for assessing and responding to the situation. Imagine, further, that because AI systems can operate hundreds of times faster than humans, this ‘country’ is operating with a time advantage relative to all other countries: for every cognitive action we can take, this country can take ten.

Any half-decent national security adviser, suggests Amodei, would advise his boss that they are facing ‘the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.’

Let’s pause here, and remind ourselves that the man issuing this warning about world-ending machines is currently engaged in building them.

Faced with this kind of thing, it can seem almost irrelevant to worry about the future of storytelling. Who cares about novels if the entire world is about to be consumed by killer machines armed with Nobel Prizes? But this would be to miss something important: Amodei is telling a story. It is the same story that Silicon Valley tells about everything. It is the story of Progress, carried forward by interconnected, and increasingly biologically-embedded, digital technologies. It is the story of how we use our big brains to create bigger brains, which then solve all of our problems. Ultimately, we will become happy immortals living in a world of plenty. There will be no poverty or grief. There will be no death. The Earth will be healed. All we need to do is to trust the machines.

I dug into this story at great length in my recent book Against The Machine: indeed, the whole book is an attempt to unpack and challenge it. But whichever side you find yourself on, the fact is that both Amodei and I are telling stories; or perhaps different versions of the same one. His is culturally dominant right now, and has all the money and power behind it. It is manifesting in your life and mine every minute, whether we like it or not. Even books with Penguin logos on them don’t stand a chance against a story like this. It is the tale of our century.

But that doesn’t make it true.

My 2021 novel Alexandria is set a thousand years from now, in a world where Amodei’s hopes and fears have both come true. A wild and empty land - empty of humans, at least - is the setting for the tale of a small band of post-civilised humans in the re-flooded fens of eastern England. They are not survivors of some climatic or nuclear apocalypse. They are some of the few remaining people who have refused to leave what Amodei refers to as their ‘physical limitations’ - otherwise known as bodies - and be ‘uploaded’ into an immortal post-human paradise. They have banded together and created their own earth-bound stories to keep them, as the kids would say these days, Touching Grass. They have their own gods and their own tales, and the Machine is their deadly foe.

Overseeing this world is (what appears to be) a vast, super-intelligent AI named Wayland, which sees its task as compassionately removing humanity from the Earth. Given the human body’s propensity for destruction, it reasons, the proposal makes perfect sense. A world without human bodies is a world without war, genocide, ecological destruction, rape and murder. Disembodied human mindfiles, by contrast, could live forever in the cloud, and never suffer. For the sake of progress, evolution, compassion or whatever you choose to call it, the body - biology itself - should be excised from the Earth. This is a story too.

Alexandria, along with three of my other books, was one of many thousands pirated by Amodei’s Anthropic corporation in one of the biggest acts of mass corporate copyright theft in history. With deep irony, but with no permission, Anthropic have been using Alexandria to train their AI systems. A class action lawsuit, filed against them on behalf of a group of writers and publishers, was settled in September 2025. Anthropic agreed to pay out a total of $1.5 billion: the largest copyright resolution in American history. This is peanuts to Anthropic, of course, whose valuation is currently approaching $350 billion. But sometimes the little guy strikes back, and wins.

Where do we stand then - writers and readers both? Where do our stories stand?

One thing that is very clear is that AI systems will soon be able to write serious novels, poems, screenplays and indeed essays, and that they may be indistinguishable from work written by humans. Maybe plenty of them will be better. The list of ‘professional’ jobs that currently face the chop from the advance of AI is long and daunting, but every form of writing is very much amongst them.

This, of course, is just the latest phase of the long Industrial Revolution which began, at least in Europe, in the eighteenth century, and is still playing out. Over that time, the Machine has destroyed more livelihoods and lifeways than we could count, from handloom weavers to farmers. Now the same Machine - bigger, faster, digitised - is coming for the bourgeoisie, which is why we are suddenly seeing articles all over the legacy media about the terrible impact of AI on jobs and careers. You never saw those articles when the blacksmiths went out of business. But capitalism has no mercy, even for its own satraps.

I don’t much care about jobs - even mine. Not here, anyhow. I am not writing about economics; I am writing about stories. Telling stories is neither a job nor a career, and any writer who thinks otherwise is probably no good. Telling stories is what all humans do; it’s just that some of us do it more than others. Some of us become obsessed with stories and are thus able to see them everywhere and begin to understand how they work.

The world emerging now is brim-full of non-human, and inhuman, stories. It began with crappy deepfake videos and is very quickly accelerating into a landscape of ‘storytelling’ that is artifice all the way down. If machines can produce our food and light our houses and employ us all in whatever it is we do, then they can certainly tell our stories for us, and perhaps they will need to. The rise of the Machine was never going to stop where we might want it to. In the end, it will consume and colonise everything, including our bodies; including our tales.

Nothing is sacred now, and nobody will be immune from the coming age of machine stories. Not the established storytelling institutions of the state: witness the BBC resurrecting the much-loved crime writer Agatha Christie to ‘teach’ their online writing course. Not the rich and the powerful: the audiobook version of Melania Trump’s autobiography sounds like it was voiced by her, but is in fact entirely narrated by an AI, which I’m sure will disappoint all you avid lovers of great literature.

There are, of course, writers out there championing all of this. They believe that AI will ‘help’ their creativity. I’ve met some of these people. I don’t understand them, and I don’t think they understand what is going on. They don’t see that they are food, and so are all of their words.

If AI doesn’t kill us, it will certainly render us incapable of understanding what reality is. The age of AI, in the words of Gabriel Rossman in a powerful essay for Compact magazine, is a ‘great oxygenation event for the intellect.’ Having outsourced our physical labour to machines (and poor people in poor countries, who we never have to meet or think about), we are now outsourcing our intellectual labour to them too. Every teacher and academic knows that some students are now using AIs to write their essays: one university professor I know has his students write their submissions by hand, to avoid the possibility. Another recently told me that his students can no longer read entire books: they have to be assigned short extracts instead, because they can’t concentrate on a whole novel. He is a professor of English Literature.

There is one question that both of Dario Amodei’s essays struggle to answer: the biggest question of all. If the machines can do our research and write our stories, and build our houses and think ‘smarter’ thoughts than we can and all the rest of it - what is our role? What is the point of humanity at all? For the subset of us who write and tell stories, another question emerges too: can we even find the space, away from the buzzing of the Machine, to incubate the stories we want to tell? Stories descend when you make the right space for them within you. Writers are vessels. How can we possibly tell real, human, stories if our heads are full of digital noise? Will the ‘writers’ of the future even know what stories are, away from the enabling, imprisoning Panopticon of the digital world?

More to the point: what can we do?

Once I wanted to be a writer, and now I am. And as a writer, I want to take a stand, however small, against the Ignorance Machine of Artificial Intelligence. Despite the rush and the pull of this insane age, we are not powerless. We remain human, and we have choices. The deskilling and the dehumanising impacts of AI can be both resisted and refused, at least in our own lives. Nobody can make us use these things - not yet, at least. Nobody can stop us reading or writing real stories. We can decide, as much as it is within our power, what to engage with - and what not to.

I have decided, as a writer, not to consciously engage with AI in any way in the course of my work, and I want to give other writers - and readers - who share these views a chance to demonstrate it, and band together in refusal of the machines and in celebration of raw human creativity and the power of stories. This essay, then, is the launch of a campaign of refusal and resistance. I have no funding and no plan, and I don’t intend to run anything - but I don’t need to. Like the Internet itself, resistance to AI is decentralised. Each of us is a campaign hub. Saying no to AI and yes to human stories can happen anywhere. It costs nothing. You can start right here, right now, if you haven’t started already.

In the war against stories, I am taking a side. If you take the same side, then we’re in it together. Let’s gang up. There’s strength in numbers.

I’m calling this the Writers Against AI campaign. It is built on a simple three-point manifesto. To support the campaign, a writer must make three pledges:

• I will not use AI in my work as a writer.

• I will not support writers who use AI in their work.

• I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.

The first of these points draws a line for our own creative work. We say, as storytellers: we will remain human. With the second, we refuse to lend our voices or our money to anyone who uses this technology to replace human creativity. Finally, we commit to doing something positive: supporting, financially and morally, other creators who are drawing the line too, and refusing to be dehumanised.

If you are a writer who agrees with these pledges and who wants to sign up to this campaign - well, that agreement is all it takes. You’re in, and there’s a very simple way to show it. Colorado craftsman Justin Clark has created a set of logos that can be downloaded and used by any writer who wants to adhere to these three points and resist the use of AI in writing and publishing. Justin is not a writer - or, indeed, a graphic designer - but he responded to my call for logos back in September, and I think his creations are striking and powerful. It’s not just writers this thing threatens, of course. All craftspeople are under attack. But we have an advantage: we have both hands and hearts.

You can find Justin’s campaign logos on this page. They are free to use and anti-copyright for any writer who supports the aims of this campaign. Put them on your website or blog, or print them in your books if you like. You don’t have to ask permission: you just have to commit to the three pledges, and use your words to support them.

But, I hear you cry, I am a reader, not a writer, and I hate AI too! What can I do? Never fear, because you are also catered for. Justin has also produced reader-themed versions of the campaign logos:

They can be found, and downloaded, in the same place. Print them out and stick them in your books, or on your website, or on the self-driving car windscreens of any AI developers who live in your neighbourhood.

What happens next? The answer is: you do. I have said my piece here, with this essay and manifesto, and Justin has done his work with these striking images. This is the firing of a starting gun. How far the race is run is now up to you. If you want to join the campaign, all you need to do it take this little manifesto and these images far and wide. Use them in your own work. Write about them. Badger others. Above all, continue to write stories with only your hand, your heart and your human brain.

Together, we can all take a stand. If we don’t, our children and grandchildren will not be visiting public libraries to seek out battered old paperbacks containing human-produced magic. They will be listening to AIs reading them AI-created stories through their neuralink brain chips.

Nothing is off limits now - unless we place limits around it. At the very least, we can all plant a seed. Isn’t that how we learned to love stories in the first place?