John Scalzi
Science Fiction Author
Hugo-winning science fiction author (Old Man’s War, Redshirts) who bans AI from his books by contract, keeps AI art off his covers, and uses his long-running blog Whatever to skewer the “AI slop” eating the internet.
In his words
The Internet may yet be inundated with ‘AI’ slop, but Whatever is and will remain a small island of human activity.
I don’t and won’t use ‘AI’ in the text of any of my published work.
Biography
John Scalzi (b. 1969) is one of the most commercially reliable names in American science fiction: Old Man’s War launched his career in 2005, Redshirts won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and he signed a famously large multi-book deal with Tor. A former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he has blogged at Whatever since 1998.
A hard contractual point
Scalzi’s anti-AI stance is practical and enforced in writing. His book contracts oblige him to write every word himself, and after the Italian edition of Starter Villain was found to have used AI-generated stock art on its cover, he publicly reaffirmed that human-made art on his books is a hard contractual point. When ChatGPT arrived he initially found it intriguing, but concluded the consumer version was, in his words, “deeply flawed and also based on the theft of work from literally millions of creators.”
If you’re reading a John Scalzi book, it all came out of my brain, plain and simple.
On Whatever, Scalzi returns to the theme regularly — cataloguing AI-fabricated facts about his own life, mocking AI-written business emails, and predicting that the flood of machine-generated novels on self-publishing platforms will mostly “sit there, unread, until the heat death of the universe.” Unlike many peers, he channels his objections through his blog and contracts rather than the courts.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/john-scalzi