Roxane Gay
Essayist & Cultural Critic
Bad Feminist author and cultural critic who signed the Authors Guild letter demanding AI companies get consent and pay writers — while showing what consent looks like by licensing her own commentary, for pay, to an AI reading app.
In her words
We, the undersigned, call your attention to the inherent injustice in exploiting our works as part of your AI systems without our consent, credit, or compensation.
Biography
Roxane Gay (b. 1974) is an American essayist, novelist and cultural critic whose collection Bad Feminist (2014) became a defining text of contemporary feminist writing, followed by the memoir Hunger (2017) and the story collection Difficult Women. She is a New York Times contributing opinion writer and publishes the newsletter The Audacity.
Consent, credit, compensation
In July 2023, Gay signed the The Authors Guild open letter to the heads of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, IBM and Microsoft, alongside Margaret Atwood, Celeste Ng and more than 15,000 other writers. The letter demanded that AI companies obtain permission before using copyrighted books as training data and fairly compensate authors for past and ongoing use, warning that generative AI threatens to flood the market with “mediocre, machine-written books” built on authors’ work.
Gay’s position is pointed but not absolutist. In 2024 she became one of the marquee “Rebinders” for Rebind, an AI-powered reading companion built on public-domain classics: the company paid her for many hours of recorded conversation about Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which powers an interactive guide for readers. The distinction she draws is the one in the letter — the difference between work taken without permission and expertise licensed on the author’s terms.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/roxane-gay