Big Five Publishers Quietly Adopt AI as Staff Revolt — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- HarperCollins purchased Claude licenses from Anthropic and "voluntold" staff to become "AI Champions" running monthly brainstorming sessions; a meeting leader dismissed employee concerns about legal and environmental impacts as "the cost of doing business," per an attendee.
- Simon & Schuster workers gathered signatures on an open letter to CEO Greg Greeley opposing an experimental trial with Skan AI surveillance software, reportedly pushed by investment firm KKR; Greeley replied no decision had been made, and AI-detection platform Pangram indicated parts of his reply memo were AI-written.
- Literary agents have begun adding AI clauses to author contracts barring publishers from running manuscripts through LLMs, with one HarperCollins source saying legal told editors they could not paste full manuscripts into open-loop models—though Hachette declined to comment on whether any closed-loop safeguards are in place.
- Hachette employees told WIRED they are bracing for AI policies to "evolve" under new chief information officer Carl Hixson, who previously served as CTO at Saudi state-backed SRMG, a company that has "publicly embraced agentic AI."
- Across the Big Five, multiple staffers told WIRED they are only experimenting with AI because earlier layoffs reduced their teams to "five or six people" handling double or triple the book load; the average entry-level NYC Big Five publishing salary was $47,583 in 2023.
- OpenAI representatives led a Simon & Schuster workshop where one recommendation was using ChatGPT to draft emails to literary agents—a practice that has spread to HarperCollins and Hachette editors, with multiple agents telling WIRED they now recognize AI rejection letters by phrases like "not this, but that."
Why it matters: Publishers have built their public AI stance around punishing authors and suing model makers, while internally forcing skeleton-crew staff—created by the same publishers' layoffs—to feed manuscripts and workflows into the very chatbots they vilify. With agents now embedding AI clauses into author contracts, every forthcoming deal will likely turn on whether publishers can credibly guarantee their LLMs won't train on, leak, or replace human judgment over an author's work.
Ask SkimNews
