Celeste Ng
Novelist
Author of Little Fires Everywhere who signed the Authors Guild open letter — not a call to ban AI, but a demand that companies obtain writers’ consent, credit and compensation before training on their books.
In her words
The introduction of AI threatens to tip the scale to make it even more difficult, if not impossible, for writers — especially young writers and voices from under-represented communities — to earn a living from their profession.
Biography
Celeste Ng (b. 1980) is the American novelist behind Everything I Never Told You (2014), Little Fires Everywhere (2017) — adapted into the Emmy-nominated Hulu series with Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington — and the dystopian Our Missing Hearts (2022), a novel about authoritarianism and the policing of culture that reads today as unnervingly on-theme.
Signing on against unlicensed training
In July 2023, Ng joined James Patterson, Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay and thousands of other writers in signing the The Authors Guild open letter to the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM and Microsoft. The letter condemned “the inherent injustice in exploiting our works as part of your AI systems without our consent, credit, or compensation” and demanded permission and payment for both past and ongoing training use.
The letter landed amid the revelations that pirated datasets like Books3 — and later Meta’s use of the LibGen shadow library — had swept up the work of most prominent American novelists, Ng among them. She has kept her opposition visible on social media, where she frequently amplifies authors’ campaigns against unlicensed AI training and the flood of machine-generated imitations on bookselling platforms.
Where they stand in the war
Voices for AI
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/celeste-ng