Margaret Atwood
Novelist & Poet
Author of The Handmaid’s Tale and two-time Booker winner. After finding 33 of her books in a pirated AI training dataset, she has skewered the industry in scorching, funny essays — and signed the open letters demanding consent and payment.
In her words
To add insult to injury, the bot is being trained on pirated copies of my books. How cheap is that? Would it kill these companies to shell out the measly price of 33 books?
They intend to make a lot of money off the entities they have reared and fattened on my words, so they could at least buy me a coffee.
Biography
Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist — author of The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and more than fifty other books, and a two-time Booker Prize winner (The Blind Assassin, The Testaments). Few living writers have spent more time imagining technological dystopias, which gives her AI commentary a certain told-you-so authority.
Thirty-three pirated books and a Stepford replica
In August 2023, The Atlantic revealed that the Books3 dataset used to train large language models contained thousands of pirated books — 33 of them Atwood’s. Her response, the essay “Murdered by My Replica?,” invoked The Stepford Wives: “The companies developing generative AI seem to have something like that in mind for me, at least in my capacity as an author.” The piece mixed genuine alarm about authors being replaced by cut-rate imitations with her trademark acid wit about companies too cheap to buy the books they took.
She also signed the Authors Guild’s July 2023 open letter demanding consent, credit, and compensation from AI companies, joining more than 15,000 writers including Jodi Picoult. And in October 2023 she took the fight to the product itself, reviewing an AI-written “Margaret Atwood story” for The Walrus — finding it a competent pastiche riddled with logical holes (“If it’s a desolate, perma-frosted ghost town, why haven’t those folks just, you know, moved?”).
Atwood’s position is not technophobia — she has long been an early adopter, even inventing the LongPen remote-signing device — but a demand that the people whose words fed the machines be asked and paid. The imitations, she suggests, are not yet good; the theft, she insists, is already real.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/margaret-atwood