Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen (born 1959) is an American novelist and essayist whose sprawling family sagas — The Corrections (winner of the 2001 National Book Award), Freedom, and Crossroads — made him one of the defining literary figures of his generation, landing him on the cover of Time as the “Great American Novelist.”

A career-long technology skeptic meets AI

Franzen has spent decades as literature’s most conspicuous technology skeptic — he has inveighed against Twitter, smartphones, and the attention economy in essays and interviews since the 1990s. His opposition to generative AI is of a piece with that history, but sharper: this time, he argues, the technology was built directly out of writers’ stolen work.

In September 2023 he joined the Authors Guild and 16 other writers — including Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin — as a named plaintiff in a class action against OpenAI, alleging the company copied their novels wholesale from pirate ebook repositories to train the models behind ChatGPT. As a class representative, Franzen supplied the suit’s crispest framing: authors should decide whether their books train AI at all, and be paid if they opt in.

The litigation has outlasted the initial headlines. In 2025 a federal court allowed key claims to proceed, ruling that even AI-generated summaries of the plaintiffs’ novels could infringe if they capture protected expression in detail — keeping Franzen and his co-plaintiffs at the center of the defining copyright fight of the AI era.