I Do Not Use LLMs in My Work — Charlie Stross Draws a Line Against AI in Writing

Hugo-winning sci-fi author Charlie Stross publishes a blistering manifesto refusing to use AI in his creative work, joining 10,000 writers in the growing protest against unauthorized AI training on copyrighted books.

Charlie Stross, the Hugo-winning author behind Accelerando and The Laundry Files, has published an uncompromising manifesto on his blog: he does not use large language models in his writing — and he thinks no serious author should.

"I do not use LLMs in my work. I don't use them in my non-work life either, for that matter," Stross writes. With seven Hugo-shortlisted novels, three Hugo-winning novellas, and two Locus awards to his name — all written well before OpenAI was founded in 2015 — his argument is simple: "Clearly I don't need AI to write award-winning stories."

The post is more than a personal statement. Stross is a party to the class action lawsuit against Anthropic for allegedly pirating ebooks to train its models. He describes LLM companies as "absolute scum" engaged in theft no different from "a burglar who robs you one day then comes round to sell you your stuff back the next morning." His own server, he notes, gets periodically "swarmed by Chinese and other foreign botnets scraping data for training LLMs."

Stross also warns about the practical risk: feed a story outline to ChatGPT or Claude, and the next model may be trained on your work, capable of reproducing it for someone else. On the oft-cited "AI detector" claim that em-dashes signal machine-generated text, he is characteristically blunt: "Listen, fuckers, LLMs sprinkle em-dashes in their output because they've been trained by stealing all the text on the internet that isn't nailed down."

He does draw a distinction. Image recognition, statistical analysis of ancient texts like Linear A, and other narrow applications earn his respect. But for creative writing? "I write fiction compulsively — so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?"

Stross's stance lands in the middle of a widening revolt. In March, about 10,000 authors — including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory, and Richard Osman — published Don't Steal This Book, a protest volume whose only content is a list of their names. Organizer Ed Newton-Rex put it plainly: "The AI industry was built on stolen work… taken without permission or payment." Copies were distributed at the London Book Fair ahead of a UK government deadline to assess proposed copyright law changes.

Stross, who once wrote some of the most vivid singularity fiction ever published, is now drawing the line where the machine meets the art. For him, the boundary is non-negotiable.

Sources: Charlie Stross — On the non-use of AI in my writing process, The Guardian — Thousands of authors publish 'empty' book in protest over AI