HarperCollins Calls Itself an ‘AI Inputs Company’ — While Its Best-Seller Is an Erotic Hockey Novel
There are moments when literary reality surpasses anything Borges could have imagined. This week, Robert Thomson, CEO of HarperCollins, described his company as “an AI inputs company” — meaning a company whose fundamental purpose is to feed artificial intelligence models with content. The same quarter in which its biggest bestselling title is an erotic hockey novel called Heated Rivalry.
Do you see the irony? Because I see it perfectly.
HarperCollins reported $555 million in sales for Q3, up 8% year-over-year. Digital books grew 17%. Everything very good. Thomson was emphatic that the company has deals with Meta and OpenAI, and anticipates income from the Anthropic case — the settlement in which Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors whose books were used to train language models without permission.
Pause. HarperCollins is happy that its books were used without permission by an AI because at least they’ll get paid? Well. Yes. That is literally what is being said.
Thomson also warned against companies that “purchase stolen material from unauthorised sources,” referring to competitors using illegal scraping data. Said by the CEO who just called his company an “AI inputs provider.” Coherence is, indeed, a skill that is learned with practice.
The most beautiful part is that Rachel Reid, whose Game Changer series and the aforementioned Heated Rivalry drove the quarterly results, probably knows nothing of this. She is writing about hockey players with feelings. Her publisher’s CEO is telling investor conferences that those novels exist so robots can learn to write.
Where does literature go when the industry that sustains it begins to think of it as raw material? If you want to explore these questions with more rigour than a financial results announcement allows, Libertad de expresión by Jacob Mchangama is a good place to start: a global history of free expression that reminds us why it matters who controls the discourse.
