Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult (born 1966) is an American novelist whose issue-driven bestsellers — My Sister’s Keeper, Nineteen Minutes, Small Great Things, By Any Other Name — have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. Famously prolific and famously close to her readership, she has spent three decades writing a book a year about the moral collisions of ordinary families.

From pirated datasets to the courtroom

Picoult’s fight with the AI industry began when her novels turned up in the pirated book datasets used to train large language models. In July 2023 she co-signed the Authors Guild’s open letter to the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, and other companies — ultimately joined by more than 15,000 writers — demanding consent, credit, and compensation for the use of books in AI training.

In September 2023 she escalated from petition to litigation, becoming one of 17 named plaintiffs — alongside George R.R. Martin and John Grisham — in the Authors Guild’s class action against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York. The complaint accuses the company of “systematic theft on a mass scale,” alleging the authors’ books were downloaded from pirate ebook repositories and copied into the models behind ChatGPT.

Picoult has framed the issue less as a fear of being replaced than as a matter of basic fairness: a machine that can spin out imitations “in the style of Jodi Picoult” exists only because her actual books were taken without permission. Her stance has made her one of the most visible author-advocates in the copyright fight, even as courts continue to wrestle with whether AI training is fair use.