Philip Pullman

Sir Philip Pullman (born 1946) is the English author of His Dark Materials — the trilogy beginning with Northern Lights (1995) that became one of the most celebrated works of modern fantasy — and its successor series The Book of Dust. A former teacher and a past president of the Society of Authors, he has spent decades campaigning for writers’ pay and the value of creative labour.

Pay for the catch

Pullman’s quarrel with the AI industry is characteristically blunt. In an October 2025 BBC interview he described the wholesale scraping of authors’ books for AI training as theft on an industrial scale — a trawler dragging the seabed — and called on the UK government to change the law “at once” so that training on a writer’s work requires a licence and a payment.

He has also lent his name to the collective campaigns of British and international writers against unlicensed training, alongside fellow signatories such as Kazuo Ishiguro. His framing is deliberately transactional rather than apocalyptic: he does not argue AI must be stopped, only that using his books without paying him is wrong, whatever the current law says.

That position — license it or leave it — has made Pullman one of the clearest voices in the UK’s fight over AI and copyright, as the government weighs proposals that would let AI firms train on creative work unless rights-holders opt out.