Novelists fear AI will “entirely replace” them, Cambridge study finds

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November 21, 2025
3 min read

Novelists fear AI will “entirely replace” them, Cambridge study finds

Over half of published novelists in the UK fear that artificial intelligence (AI) will likely replace their work entirely, a survey of 258 authors and 74 industry insiders from the University of Cambridge has found. Nearly 60% of authors said that their own work had been used to train AI models without their permission or payment, while 39% believed their income had been affected by it.

85% of the novelists surveyed said that they see a future where their income would be driven by AI technology.

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The research comes from Cambridge University’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy (MCTD). Researcher, Dr Clementine Collet, surveyed the novelists and industry insiders, including commissioning editors and literary agents to study how AI is perceived and used in the British fiction world. Focus groups and interviews were also conducted around the country, as well as a co-ordinated forum with authors and publishers.

Genre authors are believed to be the most vulnerable to being replaced by AI, the report found. Two in three surveyed listed romance authors as being “extremely threatened. This was followed by thrillers (61%) and crime (60%).

On the other hand, 80% of those surveyed said that it offers benefits to parts of society with a one in three novelists admitting to use it in their writing process, mainly for “non-creative” jobs including research.

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