Elin Hilderbrand

Elin Hilderbrand (born 1969) is the Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate who turned the Nantucket summer novel into a franchise — roughly thirty bestsellers over twenty-four years, a “queen of the beach read” crown, and screen adaptations including Netflix’s The Perfect Couple — before formally retiring the genre with Swan Song in 2024.

Signing on to sue OpenAI

In September 2023 Hilderbrand became one of seventeen named plaintiffs — alongside John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George R.R. Martin — in the The Authors Guild class action against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York, amended that December to add Microsoft. The complaint alleges the companies copied the authors’ novels “wholesale, without permission or consideration,” sourcing them from pirate ebook repositories to train GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and describes the result as “flagrant and harmful infringements” of their copyrights.

Hilderbrand has let the filing speak for her: unlike co-plaintiffs David Baldacci and Douglas Preston, she has not campaigned publicly against AI, and her interviews continue to center on her books and adaptations. Her stance is registered the old-fashioned way — as a named party in federal court, lending one of commercial fiction’s most bankable names to the claim that ChatGPT was built partly on stolen beach reads.

The suit’s core theory — that mass ingestion of pirated fiction endangers writers’ livelihoods by letting anyone generate cheap imitations — remains in active litigation, having survived OpenAI’s early motion to dismiss the central copyright claim.