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December 04, 2025
Jenny Nagle | Writers Sound Alarm: Jenny Nagle Warns ‘AI Piracy’ Threatens Authors’ Rights and Livelihoods
Dale Husband
Posted On December 4, 2025
Download AudioIn 2025, growing alarm among writers and literary advocates has moved from whisper to warning, as concerns mount over how artificial-intelligence systems are being trained – often using copyrighted books and other creative works obtained without permission.
And yes we used AI to generate this article – why? to prove Jenny’s point but also our own point that creativity should not be taken as anything goes – true story.
One of the most prominent voices raising red flags is Jenny Nagle, chief executive of New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA), who has called the trend “unlawful and fundamentally threatening” to the rights and fair pay of writers. The danger, Nagle argues, lies in AI companies treating vast creative libraries as free fodder – undermining both copyright law and the economic basis for writing as a profession.
The concern has moved from academic or niche circles into the mainstream after a high-profile legal case in the United States. Earlier this year, Anthropic – a major AI company – reached a settlement of up to US $1.5 billion after allegations that its AI training data included millions of books acquired through piracy.
That lawsuit exposed how generative AI models – used to power chatbots, automated writing tools, and content-generation platforms – are often trained on massive collections of existing works, many originally authored by individuals or small publishers, without consent or compensation for the creators. For many writers, this is a familiar version of copyright theft – only on an industrial scale.
Nagle and other advocates stress that the recent settlement does not solve the underlying issue; it only draws a line in the sand about using pirated works. As one author cited in the case noted: the modest payout offered for each title (roughly US $3,000 per book for those identified) “pales” against years of effort poured into writing.
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