Philip Pullman
Author
Author of His Dark Materials and a former president of the Society of Authors. He calls the mass scraping of books to train AI a “wicked system” — immoral even where it is legal — and demands that writers be paid for training use.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +3.4antiSigned an anti-AI letter
- +1.8anti2 anti-AI statements (forceful)
- ±0nuancedSupports AI only with conditions
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score (direction-free evidence pulls toward the middle instead): Firmly Anti-AI · 5.2/10
In his words
As far as I know everybody’s work has been stolen, scraped like a trawler, at the bottom of the sea… It’s a wicked system and I’m profoundly against it.
They can do what they like with my work if they pay me for it. But stealing people’s work and then passing it off as something else — that’s immoral but unfortunately not illegal.
Biography
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.
Quote sources
- BBC News, 2025(bbc.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/philip-pullman
