In her words
We are human beings, we are writers, and we’re being exploited by people who want to use our work, again without permission or compensation, to “write” books, scripts, essays because it’s cheap and easy.
We who create stories need to unite to fight this abuse of our talent and hard work.
Biography
Nora Roberts (b. 1950) is one of the most commercially successful novelists in history, author of more than 200 books spanning romance and, as J.D. Robb, the long-running In Death futuristic suspense series, with roughly half a billion copies in print. She was the first inductee into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame.
The most-pirated living author in Books3
When The Atlantic published a searchable index of Books3 — the pirated e-book trove used to train AI models at Meta and elsewhere — in September 2023, Roberts turned out to have 206 books in the dataset, more than any other living author. She called the database and its use by tech companies “all kinds of wrong” in a statement to CNN, framing generative AI as exploitation of writers’ work without permission or pay.
Roberts had already signed the July 2023 The Authors Guild open letter, alongside James Patterson and Margaret Atwood, demanding that AI companies obtain consent and compensate authors for training on their books. Her call for writers to unite echoed a career spent policing the boundaries of authorship — she has famously pursued plagiarists of her own work for decades.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/nora-roberts