AI, copyright, and creativity: The impact of AI on the novel

Reported by: Meg Buckley, CSaP Policy Intern

AI, copyright, and creativity: The impact of AI on the novel

At the latest CSaP seminar, Policy Fellows were joined by Dr Clementine Collett, a BRAID Fellow at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy whose research focuses on how the use of AI will impact work, particularly in the creative sector. Dr Collett provided an overview of the broad-ranging impacts of AI, encompassing the ongoing debates around copyright and licencing, how the industry uses AI and how it impacts people’s livelihoods.

Dr Collett began by reminding the audience of the historical importance of storytelling, and the integral role of novels in human culture. This set the background for her interest in this area of research, and she also highlighted the creative industry’s substantial economic contribution to the UK. As part of her research, Dr Collett has met with authors, publishers, literary agents, editors, lawyers and policymakers to gain a well-rounded perspective on current AI usage in the creative industry, and how it is already impacting creative works.

Copyright and data use

Dr Collett referenced the Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Consultation which concluded in February 2025. The UK Government proposed an opt-out model which would allow creative works to be used to train AI models by default, unless the owner of the copyright explicitly chooses to opt out.

This proposal has sparked a debate, with many individuals and groups criticising this model for insufficiently protecting copyright and lacking mandates for AI companies to disclose their training data sources. The importance of protecting copyrighted material was recently demonstrated by an article published in The Atlantic detailing Meta’s use of databases such as LibGen to train it’s LLMs on pirated books.

Reshaping livelihoods

Dr Collett talked about the specific challenges to narrators of audiobooks, ghost writers, and translators. These three lines of work within the creative industry have already seen significant changes in terms of job opportunities. AI is being used to automate the reading of books, and to draft first versions of text instead of hiring ghostwriters or translators. Publishers increasingly view AI as a cheaper and quicker alternative for these tasks, thus reducing the available work for professionals in these areas and negatively impacting their income.

Further considerations include the ethical and environmental implications of using AI. The fact that some AI models have been trained on pirated works alongside the significant water consumption required to cool the infrastructure at data centres deters many people, as they feel that it is immoral to use AI.

Redefining creativity

In her research, Dr Collett has found that people working in the creative industry are divided over the use of AI in writing. Some people have a purist view and are strongly against any use of AI in their writing, emphasising the need to come up with ideas themselves. Other groups, however, mostly organised online at present, actively exchange advice on prompts and which are the best AI models to use for various types of written work. This division highlights a ‘moral quandary’ of whether AI should be used or not in creative endeavours.

A further likely impact of AI will be its effect on literary taste and style. It isn’t yet known what readers’ reactions to the use of AI in literature will be, but Dr Collett speculated on how it might affect which genres of books are published, whether it will change demand for novels, and whether people even want to read books written by AI.

Moreover, greater adoption of AI might even influence our use of language. For instance, Dr Collett commented on the tendency of AI models to use the em dash (—), or certain words like ‘tapestry’ and ‘multifaceted’. This could change the way humans use language too, whether we adopt the em dash and use these less common words, or whether these will sit in parallel to the way humans write.

Trust, transparency and future directions

Trust is an important concept to many authors: they must trust their publisher with their work and their readers too, as writing can often be a vulnerable way of expressing themselves. The emotional side to writing or reading a book is often what connects writers and readers. Dr Collett argued that writing books partly or wholly by AI might break that human trust and connection. She suggested that further research is required to understand how consumers will receive books that have had AI involved with the writing process.

The Q&A following Dr Collett’s talk broadened the discussion to include topics ranging from the potential of AI to enhance accessibility for individuals with disabilities, the complexities of fair remuneration for content creators and whether the challenges posed by AI are unique to the English language or universal.

Regardless of one’s perception of creativity, as a solely human endeavour or one that can integrate AI systems, AI is likely to fundamentally change the creative industry. Dr Collett maintained that the UK has a strong reputation for having robust copyright laws as well as an important creative sector. She therefore emphasised the potential for the UK to set a global precedent on AI policy that effectively protects the creative industries.

Image credit: Reihaneh Golpayegani & The Bigger Picture (https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)