Zadie Smith
Novelist
The celebrated British novelist behind “White Teeth” frames AI as an extractive “portal technology” — copyright theft and propaganda on one side, cobalt mining on the other — and her books were pirated into AI training sets.
In her words
In America, AI is a copyright issue, an uncanny video, a propaganda tool. Through the portal, it is the destructive, extractive and violent contest to get sufficient cobalt and coltan out of African ground.
But we can’t let machines do our human accounting for us, nor allow Trumpism to lead the whole of humanity into a binary, Manichean world of number ones versus human zeroes.
Biography
Zadie Smith (born 1975 in London) became a literary phenomenon at 24 with “White Teeth” (2000) and has remained one of the most acclaimed novelists and essayists in English ever since — “On Beauty,” “NW,” “Swing Time,” “The Fraud” — alongside a long teaching career at New York University.
AI through the portal
Smith’s quarrel with AI runs deeper than most authors’ copyright complaints. In August 2023, The Guardian reported that her books were among more than 170,000 pirated titles in the Books3 dataset used to train models at Meta and elsewhere — making her an unconsenting contributor to the systems she distrusts.
Her fullest statement came in “Trump Gaza Number One,” a March 2025 essay for The New York Review of Books occasioned by an AI-generated propaganda video. There she described AI as a “portal technology, appearing as one thing when viewed from ‘our’ side, and quite another by the populations of mineral-rich countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo” — a machine through which rich societies hide the human and environmental costs of their conveniences.
Through that self-forgetting portal so much travels and is hidden. Not only the bloody consequences of the wars we fund and the wars we ignore, but also everything our society produces that we don’t want to deal with.
Smith’s critique is moral and material rather than technophobic: she is less worried that machines will write novels than that they will launder responsibility — for stolen books, for mined cobalt, for propaganda — behind a screen. Fellow Books3 authors like Stephen King discovered their piracy in the same reports.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/zadie-smith