Emma Donoghue and Marian Keyes among authors publishing 'empty' book in protest over AI

Emma Donoghue and Marian Keyes have joined a list of authors publishing an 'empty' book in protest over AI using their work.

About 10,000 writers contributed to Don’t Steal This Book, in which the only content is a list of their names.

The books’s back cover says: "The UK government must not legalise book theft to benefit AI companies".

Copies of the book will be distributed to attendees of the London book fair on Tuesday, March 10. The event will take place a week before the UK government is due to issue an assessment on the cost of proposed changes in copyright law.

The new law proposes letting AI firms use copyright-protected work to train chatbots and other AI tools without the owner’s permission. Elton John is among the artists who protested over the relaxation in copyright law.

The organiser of the book, as well as campaigner for protecting artists' copyright, Ed Newton-Rex said the AI industry was "built on stolen work … taken without permission or payment"

"This is not a victimless crime – generative AI competes with the people whose work it is trained on, robbing them of their livelihoods," he added.

Last September, Anthropic, a leading AI firm and developer of the Claude chatbot, agreed to pay $1.5bn (€1.28bn) to settle a lawsuit issued by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The company used pirated copies of their works to train its large language model without the authors' permission.

See the full list of Don’t Steal This Book authors here.