Big Five publishers are quietly using AI—and some employees are horrified

For Wired, I spoke with workers about the quiet push to experiment with AI tools from book publishing executives at the Big Five.

“Wiliam Caxton showing specimens of his printing to King Edward IV and his Queen.” Published in The Graphic, January 30, 1877. Public domain.

Last month, multiple workers at HarperCollins — the second-largest English-language book publisher in the world, and “ground zero for everything bad in this industry,” according to a former employee I spoke with — told me senior leaders at the company have encouraged them to experiment with AI tools including Claude, ChatGPT, and Jasper.

Since then, I’ve talked to more than two dozen staffers across the Big Five about how LLMs have quietly become part of the publishing process for some employees at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette.

You can read the full story at Wired, but some of the details surprised me, including LLM-generated publicity copy and emails to literary agents.

To be clear, most of the employees I spoke with described the usage in terms like “gross,” “unfortunate,” or “short-sighted,” but said some colleagues are reluctantly experimenting with AI due to pressure from management, or out of desperation after executives slashed their teams and increased their workloads.

For people with corporate jobs in America, C-suites encouraging LLM use in the workplace probably doesn’t sound very surprising here in the fading light of 2026. But considering book publishers have sued AI companies for copyright infringement and canceled titles suspected to include LLM-generated writing, I’d hoped — particularly as a writer who likes being published! — that our literary infrastructure would be one of the last standing against plagiarism buttons.

After the story went live, Kelly Link (author of The Book of Love) commented on BlueSky: “it’s definitely affected friends & it is doing real damage to relationships writers have with publishers.”

“None of this is especially surprising, but boy is this a deflating read,” adds Joel Pinckney, who works in publicity and marketing at the University of Texas Press. “The lack of any kind of vision from leadership beyond the logic of inevitability and the fear of being left behind is breathtaking—though, again, not especially surprising.”

Thanks, as always, for reading.