Writers protest AI, yet they are already benefiting from it, argues a Habr column

The author of the "Tokenatura" column on Habr describes a paradox in how writers relate to artificial intelligence: the profession protesting AI louder than any other is also almost the only one already getting real value from the technology.

What the writers' protest is about

The author points to a protest at the London Book Fair, where more than ten thousand writers handed visitors an empty book titled Don't Steal This Book. It contained nothing but a list of the names of the authors who backed the campaign. The gesture was meant to remind publishers and tech companies that writers' work is being used to train AI without permission or payment.

• The protest took place at the London Book Fair
• More than ten thousand writers took part
• The manifesto book is titled Don't Steal This Book
• The book contains only the names of the authors who backed the campaign, without a single word of text

Why the author sees irony here

The columnist describes himself as an AI supporter and is convinced that, in the end, everyone wins from the technology, though he acknowledges the transition will be stressful for many professions. The irony, in his view, is that writers, the loudest group of protesters, are already seeing tangible benefits from AI. Neural network-based tools speed up translating books into other languages, make audio editions and narration easier to produce, and help with editing and rough layout. In other words, they ease exactly the stages of publishing that used to be the slowest and most expensive for authors.

Other ways writers are fighting AI companies in court

The empty-book protest is just one of many ways the authors' industry has responded in recent years to the use of their texts for model training. Alongside public gestures like the book fair campaign, authors and publishers in various countries are suing major AI companies over training models on copyrighted texts without permission or payment. The issue remains one of the sharpest points of friction between the tech and publishing industries.

Where writers already benefit from AI

The columnist does not list specific tools, but his argument rests on a notable trend of recent years: publishing was one of the first industries to build generative models into its own workflows. That ranges from machine translation of books, which significantly speeds up getting foreign editions into new markets, to speech synthesis for audiobooks, which cuts narration costs for authors who lack the budget for a studio recording with a professional narrator. These tools matter most to independent authors who self-publish without a major publisher: they remove some of the costs that once put international markets out of reach for lesser-known names.

What this means

The dispute between writers and tech companies over using texts to train models is far from over, but the Habr column captures a broader trend: a profession's reaction to AI often diverges from who actually benefits from it in the moment, and the authors' industry is a clear example.