HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster quietly hand book copy to chatbots

Three of the five biggest publishers in the United States are using ChatGPT and Claude to write the text readers see on book jackets, Amazon listings and Goodreads pages, according to a WIRED investigation. More than two dozen employees at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette described chatbots drafting publicity copy, emails to literary agents, marketing videos and even cover art, without public disclosure or the consent of the authors involved.

The contrast is what stings. In public, publishing has cast itself as one of the loudest opponents of generative AI, suing over copyright and cancelling books whose authors were suspected of letting a language model do the writing. Inside the same industry, the tools have become ordinary office software, and the person who picks up a novel because of its back-cover pitch has no way of knowing who, or what, wrote that pitch.

At HarperCollins, senior leaders bought Claude licences from Anthropic and then, according to a current employee, struggled to work out what to do with them. Dozens of staff were drafted as “AI Champions” and asked to find uses in monthly brainstorming sessions. The company also pays for ChatGPT and for Jasper, a platform that promises to run marketing workflows from start to finish, and one division has gone “all in”, including AI-generated marketing videos.

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