Hugh Howey
Author of Wool / Silo
Self-publishing pioneer behind the Wool/Silo saga who publicly grants AI permission to train on his work, calling language models “a distillation of our combined intelligence” — one of the loudest pro-AI voices among working novelists.
In his words
I want AI trained on my work. I have a very positive view of AI.
These models are, in a way, a distillation of our combined intelligence, our thoughts, our wisdom, our unique writing voices.
Biography
Hugh Howey (born 1975) is the American science-fiction writer whose self-published serial Wool (2011) became one of the defining success stories of the Kindle era, selling millions of copies before Simon & Schuster picked up print rights and Apple TV+ adapted it as the series Silo. Fittingly for a novelist obsessed with humanity’s future, his 2017 collection was titled Machine Learning.
Permission granted
While the The Authors Guild organized letters and lawsuits over unlicensed AI training in 2023, Howey went the other way. In a July 2023 post on his site titled “AI Training Permission,” he explicitly welcomed AI companies to train on his books, responding to a reader who wanted copyright pages to prohibit machine learning.
We are creating something very special, almost like a child of our every mind, and I think that’s amazing.
Howey argues that training is inevitable anyway — books enter the public domain eventually — and that the difference between human and machine creativity is one of degree, not kind. He has written that he is thrilled his work might contribute to an intelligence that will outlast individual humans and perhaps humanity collectively. It is a startlingly rare position among bestselling novelists, most of whom lined up behind the Guild’s protest letter or the lawsuits of peers like John Grisham.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/hugh-howey