R.F. Kuang

Rebecca F. Kuang (born 1996) is one of the most commercially and critically successful novelists of her generation: the Poppy War trilogy, the award-winning “Babel” (2022), the publishing-industry satire “Yellowface” (2023), and “Katabasis” (2025). A Marshall Scholar with degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, she is also a PhD candidate in East Asian languages at Yale.

Signing against AI

In June 2025 Kuang joined more than 70 writers — alongside Lauren Groff, Leigh Bardugo, and Emily Henry — in signing “Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Publishers,” published on Literary Hub. The letter demands that publishers never release machine-generated books, never replace staff or audiobook narrators with AI, and names the underlying grievance plainly: writers’ work was “stolen from us and used to train machines” that could soon generate the books filling bookstores.

Her personal case against AI is less about copyright than cognition. In a December 2025 Channel 4 News interview she described campuses where students use AI to write essays and even excuse-emails, calling the habit “cognitively debilitating” — a machine that “will just tell you what lots of other people have thought on this topic and assemble a response that looks passively human.”

The irony has not escaped readers that “Yellowface” — a novel about a writer stealing another’s manuscript — anticipated the AI training debate’s core question of whose words belong to whom. Kuang stands with the The Authors Guild generation of writers who see unlicensed training as the same old theft at industrial scale.