AI Refusal by Creative Writers

AI Refusal by Creative Writers #

J. Williams, B. Caramiaux, Q. V. Liao, G. Ramos, K. Crawford (ongoing)

As generative AI tools grow in prevalence and capabilities, so too has a corpus of research grown around the evolving role of generative AI in creative spheres (e.g. Hwang et al., 2025; Doshi et al., 2024), including harms experienced by artists such as damage to artists’ reputations, loss of income, and copyright infringement (Jiang et al., 2023) as well as the potential harms resulting from the dominant narratives about AI in artistic practice (Caramiaux et al., 2025).

In parallel, artists’ resistance to AI has become more vocal and organized. This is especially visible in creative writing spaces, such as the Authors Guild’s class-action suit against OpenAI for copyright infringement (Guild 2023) and the Hollywood screenwriters’ strike over AI use (Kinder 2024). This resistance appears to share characteristics of tech refusal more broadly (e.g. Laumer & Eckhardt, 2012) as well as generative AI non-use across a range of scenarios (e.g. Wells et al., 2025). For creative writers specifically, recent research shows general pessimism about generative AI’s effects on the publishing industry (Lamb et al., 2024). But thus far, limited research has cataloged the nature of creative writers’ resistance to generative AI specifically as part of the writing process.

Through semi-structured interviews with fiction writers who self-describe as voluntary non-users of generative AI for their creative process, we are attempting to answer the research question: Why are some writers refusing to use generative AI tools for their creative process? As part of this question, we plan to build on our existing research on narratives in AI and the arts to further understand how writers’ refusal might be situated in a larger sociotechnical context of competing values and narratives about generative AI in the creative sphere.

We are currently conducting an inductive thematic analysis. Some preliminary themes are already emerging, including ethical objections at individual, peer, societal, and global levels; the role of embodied/lived experiences in writing; perceived incompatibility between LLM design and writers’ privileging of originality and self-expression; and potential relationships between writers’ sociopolitical views and their attitudes towards generative AI.

As part of this project, we hope to conclude with recommendations for building and deploying AI technologies in ways that center human artists’ values and identities. These recommendations may include design guidance, shifts in AI narratives, and/or policy proposals.

References

  1. Caramiaux, B., Crawford, K., Liao, Q. V., Ramos, G., & Williams, J. (2025). Generative AI and Creative Work: Narratives, Values, and Impacts. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.03940.
  2. Doshi, A. R., & Hauser, O. P. (2024). Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content. Science Advances, 10(28), eadn5290.
  3. Jiang, H. H., Brown, L., Cheng, J., Khan, M., Gupta, A., Workman, D., … & Gebru, T. (2023, August). AI Art and its Impact on Artists. In Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (pp. 363-374).