TRAVERSE CITY — “Hey ChatGPT, write me a story.”
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence, especially large-language models such as ChatGPT, has become engrained in daily lives worldwide, from business use to casual search requests. In the average eye, it can do anything — so long as it has somewhere, or something, to inform its approach.
For Michigan-born authors Mardi Link and Anne-Marie Oomen, their books became the source of its information.
In early summer 2025, both women found out through a breaking story in The Atlantic that a lawsuit had been filed against the website Anthropic for alleged nonconsensual use of published materials to train a large language model called LibGen (Library Genesis). The article featured a full list of books that had been used — including three memoirs written by Oomen, and five nonfiction books written by Link. It would be months before they received further information in the form of a class-action lawsuit notification.
Link, currently in the process of working on her sixth book, had an especially defeating realization upon this news.
“I’ve published five nonfiction books and every single one of them is in the database, which means computers have used my books without my permission to train themselves. Basically, it feels like training my replacement,” she said.
Oomen was similarly shocked.
“There are literally thousands and thousands of other writers involved in this. Three of my books popped right up that had been what they call scraped, which means all the text had been taken without permission to train these large language models,” Oomen said.
“AI large language models are so powerful now. I will fully acknowledge that what AI can do for the science fields and medicine is pretty phenomenal,” she said. “I’m not saying that it’s the devil incarnate, but I am deeply concerned about what it means to the human imagination and particularly for literary artists and writers.”
Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries primarily defines art as, “the use of the imagination to express ideas or feelings, particularly in painting, drawing or sculpture.” This, of course, only mentions a few of the multiple forms of art, not even breaking the surface of forms such as writing, film, dance and more.
Todd Goddard, a recent National Writers’ Series guest, has had his own strange experience with AI intersecting his writing. His recently published biography, “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life,” appeared to be briefly ripped off in the form of an AI-written, bland biography with the same name, which has since been taken off of book sales websites Amazon and ThriftBooks.
Despite the content of his work not being stolen, the situation still felt cheap. When Executive Director of National Writers Series Anne Stanton reached out to him with the unfamiliar listing after receiving it from a peer, his initial reaction was surprise.
“My first reaction was that it appeared to be a knockoff of my book, you know; something that had taken my title. I had no idea, but it certainly didn’t seem to be legitimate to me. I didn’t know the author. and I know almost everyone in Harrison’s world, and a lot of people who go to the Harrison archive. It seemed more than just some odd coincidence,” Goddard said.
From the first email he sent to the final publication date of Nov. 4, 2025, roughly seven years of traveling cross-country for interviews, poring over archives and studying Harrison’s work had passed. For Goddard, the art of biography, the art of biography writing alone doesn’t necessarily lie in the writing, but in the research process and relationships he made.
“Maybe I lack the vision, but I can’t quite see how AI would be able to accomplish gaining people’s trust in interviewing them and going to visit them and sitting down with them in person and going through all the things that I did. You learn people’s stories and feelings and memories and thoughts about the subject,” he said. “Which isn’t to say that you can’t throw a vast net over the internet and sort of scrape everything together that you can find and put together a narrative of somebody’s life, but it’s not gonna have the granular detail that you can only get from showing up physically and doing the work.”
Link echoed the sentiment.
“I don’t want a computer to do the work. I want to do the work. What’s the point of doing historical research if you’re not making these discoveries, if you’re turning that power over to a computer? I’m interested in keeping that power for myself. I’m selfish that way. I don’t want to give that to a machine.”
I like to go to archives. I like to hold pieces of paper in my hand. I like to talk to people. I like to read books and scholarly articles. Very occasionally AI will have an idea. Most of the good ideas come from humans,” she said.
Oomen, who is currently holding for final results of the lawsuit, with any minimal payout to come in 2027, has taken this as the beginning of an essential conversation.
“I think being watchful is really necessary. I do think that this class action lawsuit is really important because if there is no stopping these companies developing AI platforms for large language models, then they need to pay for the product that they’re stealing, that they’re taking, that they need; that’s what the class action suit is about, since you’ve already scraped these books, you need to pay the authors for their work,” she said. “No one can put a price on human imagination, but it will not ever match the 10 years it took me to write my first book.”
In her eyes, the ways in which artificial intelligence is entering the art world is difficult to predict. Whether artists will choose to collaborate with AI, or use it as a research tool, or balance ideas with it — the possibilities are numerous, and not all negative. Still, she hopes that people will preserve the essence of art as these paths develop.
“Fascination feeds following sometimes, and I think people are to some degree fascinated and they will follow that. It doesn’t replace the quirkiness and eccentricity of inventing yourself and then inventing on your own, and in the end, I think people are going to feel strongly about respecting that; the sort of flawed freshness that happens when people are working through ideas in a human way,” she said. “The authenticity behind art needs to be there for it to feel the same.”
Goddard concurred.
“I think people like reading books by people and I think people like listening to music by people. And although I think there’ll be a space probably occupied by AI-created products, both in music and literature, my feeling is that what people really appreciate about those works is the human behind them,” he said.
More info For more information on the Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement, visit https://authorsguild.org
“I’m not saying that it’s the devil incarnate, but I am deeply concerned about what it means to the human imagination and particularly for literary artists and writers.” — Author Anne-Marie Oomen of artificial intelligence {related_content_uuid}ec7b4d9e-12c8-4208-900f-1df6b2cd941b{/related_content_uuid}