Stephen King

Stephen King (born 1947) has dominated popular fiction for half a century — Carrie, The Shining, It, The Stand — with over 400 million books sold and more screen adaptations than any living author. When machines started learning to write, they inevitably learned from him.

The Canute essay

In August 2023, The Atlantic’s analysis of the Books3 dataset showed King’s work among the pirated books used to train generative AI. Rather than joining the The Authors Guild litigation wave, King answered with an essay in the same magazine. He declined to fight the tide, writing that forbidding AI training would make him a Luddite “trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.”

The essay is no love letter to the machines. King argued that genuine creativity requires sentience and found AI’s imitations hollow on inspection — the “movie money” line. But he refused to make confident predictions that it would stay that way, admitting the question of whether AI could ever write a real story left him genuinely uncertain rather than afraid.

His acceptance stands in sharp contrast to peers like George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, who sued OpenAI weeks later. King, who has spent a career monetizing dread, conspicuously declined to feel any about this — a notable data point from an author with nothing left to prove and no need to court the tech industry.