Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro (born 1954 in Nagasaki, raised in England) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. His novels — The Remains of the Day (Booker Prize, 1989), Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun — are quiet studies of memory, service, and what it means to be human. Fittingly for this debate, Klara and the Sun (2021) is narrated by an artificial friend: Ishiguro has imagined machine minds with more tenderness than almost any living writer.

Sympathy for the robot, not for the business model

That imaginative sympathy has not softened his position on how AI is being built. Ishiguro signed the 2024 Statement on AI Training — organized by Ed Newton-Rex and joined by tens of thousands of creators — condemning unlicensed training on creative work. In 2026 he was among roughly 10,000 writers, with Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman, who published a deliberately blank protest book, Don’t Steal This Book, against AI companies’ unauthorized use of their work.

In a March 2025 Guardian interview he looked past copyright to something darker: AI systems, he argued, are on the verge of learning how to provoke anger, sadness, and laughter on demand — mastering the emotional levers that novelists spend a lifetime learning to pull honestly. For a writer whose entire art is the slow earning of emotion, an instant synthetic version of it is not a convenience but a hazard, to fiction and to truth alike.

Ishiguro’s stance is measured rather than absolutist — he has speculated openly about what AI means for the future of the novel — but on consent and compensation he has been unambiguous, lending a Nobel laureate’s weight to the creators’ side of the ledger.