Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft
I write fiction compulsively – before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist – so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?" wrote Charles Stross in a Saturday post. Stross graciously mentioned The Register in his Laundry Files novels."I maintain that any serious author should shun LLMs like the plague," he added. This isn't hyperbole: I'm one of the parties to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating eBooks to train their LLMs." REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); "That's not my only grievance, either.
- ▪I write fiction compulsively – before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist – so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?" wrote Charles Stross in a Saturday post.
- ▪Stross graciously mentioned The Register in his Laundry Files novels."I maintain that any serious author should shun LLMs like the plague," he added.
- ▪This isn't hyperbole: I'm one of the parties to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating eBooks to train their LLMs." REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desk
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Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/sci-fi-authors-scalzi-and-stross-decry-ais-dystopian-impact-on-their-craft/5282176 |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:27:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T10:30:45.066Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T10:30:45.066Z |
| 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 | GkB_Cp8EAZqG · 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 |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| 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
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); AI AND ML Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft LLMs are theft by 'absolute scum' who make life harder for writers by putting them in copyright peril Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor APAC Editor Published mon 3 Aug 2026 // 11:27 UTC Two prominent science fiction authors have decried the impact of AI on their craft."I do not want or need a large language model to write my fiction for me.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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