Victoria Aveyard
Bestselling Author
Number-one New York Times bestselling author of the Red Queen series and a leading BookTok voice, who has drawn a hard line against generative AI in fiction — telling millions of readers that using it makes you not a writer but a thief.
In her words
If you use Generative AI, you’re not a writer, you’re not an artist. You’re a thief.
Biography
Victoria Aveyard is an American author and screenwriter, best known for the Red Queen young-adult fantasy series, which has sold millions of copies and topped the New York Times bestseller list. With a large following across BookTok and other platforms, she is one of the more prominent working novelists to weigh in publicly on generative AI.
Drawing a line on BookTok
In 2025, amid a wave of controversy over authors and influencers embracing tools like Character.AI, Aveyard used her platform to make an uncompromising case. Using generative AI to come up with characters, plots, and story ideas, she argued, is not writing but theft — because the systems are trained on copyrighted books taken from authors without license or compensation. Her framing was deliberately stark: using the tools, she said, does not make you a writer or an artist; it makes you a thief.
Her intervention resonated because it came from inside the community most affected — the same BookTok ecosystem that both sells enormous numbers of books and, increasingly, surfaces AI-assisted content. Aveyard’s stance put commercial weight behind the authors and readers pushing back.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/victoria-aveyard