Workers at three major publishing houses tell WIRED that LLMs are being used for publicity, cover art, back cover copy, and emails, as some execs push junior staff to champion the tech.
Lincoln Michel on Twitter / X
This was my read on AI from the beginning and it proved very true. Whatever hypothetical benefits LLMs have (and they have some), their main use is to waste everyone's time wading through slop. Longer colleague powerpoints. More spam emails. More slop clogging up all the systems. https://t.co/2gtGfqf7KF— Lincoln Michel (@TheLincoln) September 21, 2026
These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech
Use our new search tool to see which authors have been used to train the machines.
How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion
Social media democratised public opinion, shifting influence away from elites and experts to ordinary people. LLMs will partly reverse this trend. They are a powerful, new technocratising force.
Dan Shipper 📧 on Twitter / X
this is true and is a big reason why you don’t need to be a highly technical researcher to use LLMs in surprising and novel ways https://t.co/TuxNzXzToU— Dan Shipper 📧 (@danshipper) July 27, 2025
LLMs Are Accelerating the Open Source Sustainability Crisis
Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind CSS, has been speaking about how LLMs have made his project more popular than ever…while also making it fall apart financially, causing him to fire 75% of his engineers. “I think AI is a huge reason why our business is struggling, even though it’s making Tailwind more popular than ever.” — Adam Wathan (12:03) How is this possible? A major cause is that LLMs are blocking Tailwind’s creators and users from forming a relationship with each other.
Oh Lord, AI Reporters Are Actually Breaking Big News
Last week, an AI newsroom beat mainstream journalists—including WIRED—to a story about OpenAI and hacking. It’s just the beginning.
Why AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books
We've long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn't sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn't been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence.
Major Publisher Cans $2.4 Million Book Deal After Author Was Accused of Using AI, for a Very Cynical Reason
A major book publisher has walked away from a $2.4 million deal for an unpublished debut novel after the author was accused of using AI.
Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training
Group of major publishers accuses the tech giant of ‘one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history’
If You’re Going To Defend AI And Whine About Its Critics, You Should Probably Be Honest About Its Actual Harms
I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumer is worth a read. In it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving to supplant many developers and prog…
Wired and Business Insider remove articles by AI-generated ‘freelancer’
At least six publications have taken down articles under the name Margaux Blanchard that were AI-generated
What can news publishers learn from creators? Interview with Simon Owens
Don't leave money on the table and think outside the box about business models
AI Companies Are Buying—And Destroying—Antique Books. Here’s Why.
Pluralistic: Why I don’t like AI art (25 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.
Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters
On the rise of newsletter production, consumption, and monetization, and how email is one of the most powerful and resilient publishing platforms.
The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.
I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, but I don't think I am alone with it.
