Authors face backlash for participation in 2022 Google AI study
News AI Authors face backlash for participation in 2022 Google AI study The 'Shameful 13' include speculative fiction luminaries Ken Liu and Robin Sloan. 11, 2026 2:24 pm EST josefkubes/Shutterstock In the spring of 2022, Google began reaching out to a series of writers, including award-winning science-fiction authors and New York Times bestsellers, for feedback on an experimental writing tool. Four years later, their participation has corners of the literary world up in arms.
- ▪News AI Authors face backlash for participation in 2022 Google AI study The 'Shameful 13' include speculative fiction luminaries Ken Liu and Robin Sloan.
- ▪11, 2026 2:24 pm EST josefkubes/Shutterstock In the spring of 2022, Google began reaching out to a series of writers, including award-winning science-fiction authors and New York Times bestsellers, for feedback on an experimental writing to
- ▪Four years later, their participation has corners of the literary world up in arms.
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| Original publisher | Engadget |
| Canonical URL | https://www.engadget.com/2234838/authors-face-backlash-for-participation-in-2022-google-ai-study/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:24:38 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T18:30:47.867Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T18:30:47.867Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ft7PmMPHv7rQ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
News AI Authors face backlash for participation in 2022 Google AI study The 'Shameful 13' include speculative fiction luminaries Ken Liu and Robin Sloan. By Max Miller Aug. 11, 2026 2:24 pm EST josefkubes/Shutterstock In the spring of 2022, Google began reaching out to a series of writers, including award-winning science-fiction authors and New York Times bestsellers, for feedback on an experimental writing tool. Four years later, their participation has corners of the literary world up in arms. Google researchers knew at the time that they were approaching a breakthrough point with large language models (LLMs). DeepMind, the company's AI division, was internally testing a natural language generation model called LaMDA which had demonstrated emergent writing capabilities.
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