Anti-AIPerson

Douglas Preston

Thriller & Nonfiction Author

The co-creator of the Pendergast thrillers is a lead named plaintiff in Authors Guild v. OpenAI, after discovering ChatGPT knew his characters, settings, and even minor figures from his books in eerie detail — proof, he argues, that his novels were ingested without permission.

Author Activism

Wikipedia Preston & Child

In his words

It was regurgitating everything. It knew my characters. It knew their names. It knew the settings. It knew everything.

— NPR Planet Money, 2023

It’s my characters, my settings, even my voice as an author, they somehow were able to duplicate using that program.

— NPR Planet Money, 2023

Biography

Douglas Preston (born 1956) started as a writer at the American Museum of Natural History — the setting he and Lincoln Child later weaponized in Relic (1995), the first of the bestselling Agent Pendergast thrillers — and built a parallel career in nonfiction with The Monster of Florence and The Lost City of the Monkey God. A veteran of authors’ collective fights (he founded Authors United during the 2014 Amazon–Hachette dispute), he became one of the most visible of the seventeen named plaintiffs in the The Authors Guild class action filed against OpenAI in September 2023.

The experiment that made him sue

Preston’s path to the courthouse began as curiosity. Playing with ChatGPT, he asked whether it knew Whittlesey, a character from Relic — and found it could supply detailed plot summaries and descriptions of even minor characters across his roughly forty books, down to Agent Pendergast’s platinum hair. Details that obscure, he told NPR’s Planet Money in November 2023, meant only one thing: “The only way I would know that is if it had ingested the book.” The complaint he joined alleges exactly that, calling GPT’s training “systematic theft on a mass scale” built on pirated ebook repositories.

Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry provide the “food” for AI systems, endless meals for which there has been no bill.

— Authors Guild open letter to AI leaders, 2023

That line comes from the Authors Guild’s July 2023 open letter to the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM, and Microsoft — a demand for consent, credit, and compensation that Preston signed along with more than 15,000 other writers, two months before the Guild and its named authors, including Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin, escalated from letter to lawsuit.