More than two dozen staff at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette told WIRED their employers now use ChatGPT and Claude to draft the public-facing text readers see every day -- back-cover copy, Amazon and Goodreads descriptions, pitches to booksellers and critics -- without disclosing it to the public or asking the authors whose books it describes. None of the three has given staff guidance on what, if anything, to tell an author whose book jacket copy came out of a chatbot.
Three publishers, three different stories
- HarperCollins
- Claude, ChatGPT and Jasper licenses; AI-made marketing videos
- Hachette
- Says AI is "operational" only
- Simon & Schuster
- "Limited, vetted" tools; use optional
The gap between policy and practice is the actual story. Hachette's public position limits AI to "operational purposes" and explicitly excludes creative work and author communication -- but employees described chatbots drafting exactly that: publicity copy, agent emails, and in some cases cover art. Simon & Schuster's marketing chief, Wibke Grutjen, said staff can use a small set of approved tools and that nobody is required to; current and former staff told WIRED the actual guidance on disclosure to authors is simply absent, and one HarperCollins employee said they believe management already knows the honest answer would cause an uproar.
The friction isn't just about authors. On Oct. 6, Simon & Schuster staff circulated an open letter opposing a trial of Skan AI, a workflow-monitoring platform employees linked to KKR, the private-equity firm that has owned the publisher since 2023. CEO Greg Greeley -- a former Amazon executive who took over in March -- told staff the same day that no decision had been made to adopt it. (Layoffs have left some teams managing two to three times as many titles as before, which several staff cited as the reason AI tools feel like a mandate rather than a convenience, whatever the official policy says.) Literary agents, meanwhile, say some have started adding contract clauses barring their clients' manuscripts from being run through language models at all -- a response to editors' rejection letters that agents say increasingly carry AI's stylistic fingerprints.
- Staff at 3 major publishers describe AI drafting book copy, emails and cover art.
- None of the three disclosed this to authors or sought their consent.
- Hachette and Simon & Schuster say AI use is "operational," not creative -- staff describe otherwise.
- Simon & Schuster staff revolted Oct. 6 against trialing a KKR-linked monitoring tool.
- Caveat: much of the reporting rests on anonymous staff accounts, not on-record admissions.