Jia Tolentino
Essayist & New Yorker Staff Writer
New Yorker staff writer and Trick Mirror author who sued OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training on her work and has written searingly about AI-generated unreality breaking our grip on the world.
In her words
Much of what we see now is fake, and the reality we face is full of horrors. More and more of the world is slipping beyond my comprehension.
Biography
Jia Tolentino (b. 1988) is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019), a bestselling essay collection about identity and the internet that made her one of the defining cultural critics of her generation. She was previously deputy editor at Jezebel.
Plaintiff and critic
In December 2023, Tolentino joined Julian Sancton’s class action against OpenAI and Microsoft, alongside Pulitzer winners Kai Bird, Taylor Branch and Stacy Schiff, alleging their books were copied without consent to train GPT models. In June 2025 she joined a further suit accusing Microsoft of training its Megatron model on roughly 200,000 pirated books to “generate a wide range of expression that mimics the syntax, voice, and themes of the copyrighted works.”
Her opposition runs deeper than copyright. In her May 2025 New Yorker essay “My Brain Finally Broke,” Tolentino described a feed-world blurred by AI slop and deepfakes, writing that language itself felt like “a vessel with holes in the bottom.” On Chris Hayes’s podcast that month she argued that generative AI amounts to a mass de-skilling experiment arriving at exactly the moment people are least equipped to absorb it, and that human hands are needed to keep what we read and see real.
The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/jia-tolentino