Why Are Writers Getting Attacked Over a Google AI Study from 2022?
Thirteen professional fiction writers who took part in a 2022 Google AI study are facing organized backlash, including boycott threats and public lists naming them, after the study was found on social media earlier this month. The writers had been recruited under secrecy agreements for an experimental program called the Wordcraft Writers Workshop. They were given early access to an AI writing tool and eight weeks to produce a short story.
The backlash started on August 6, when author Lily Lachance, who describes herself as completely opposed to generative AI, posted a link to the Wordcraft study on her Bluesky profile. Lachance reportedly found the Wordcraft website while browsing Codex, an exclusive online forum for professional speculative fiction authors. Her Bluesky post has since been deleted, but the reaction it triggered kept spreading across social platforms. Users began circulating lists naming all thirteen participants and calling for boycotts of their published works. Engadget
The underlying tensions are not new. Much of the anger among writers comes from the fact that technology companies have been training their AI systems on vast quantities of copyrighted text, often without the permission or knowledge of the authors whose work was used. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can produce new text, images, or other content by learning patterns from large amounts of existing data. The Wordcraft study, conducted in spring 2022, placed thirteen writers — including award-winning science-fiction authors and New York Times bestsellers — in a position that, from the perspective of angry peers, looked like collaboration with a company whose practices many writers view as exploitative. Engadget
The tool itself, called Wordcraft, was described as resembling Microsoft Word with a chatbot on the side. Think of it as a regular word processor with an AI assistant panel that could generate text suggestions or answer questions. It was built as a writing-focused front end for LaMDA, Google's most advanced conversational AI at the time. Each participant was given eight weeks to write a short story using the tool. At least one author used no AI-generated text whatsoever during the exercise. The resulting stories were published on Google's Magenta website alongside a research paper from the Google team, which was also posted to arXiv, a free online repository for scientific papers. Engadget; arXiv
The study was conducted during a period when Google was still openly publishing AI research that competitors could, and did, build upon. By 2023, the company had shifted to a more defensive stance after ChatGPT showed that openly shared research could help rivals catch up. The Washington Post reported in May 2023 that Google had begun restricting the publication of AI research that had previously helped jump-start competitors, a shift driven by the competitive shock of OpenAI's ChatGPT rollout.
The Wordcraft workshop sits in an unusual position in retrospect. It was an early, visible experiment in putting AI writing tools directly into the hands of creative professionals, published openly with both the stories and a research paper, at a moment before the public debate over AI and creative work had reached its current intensity. The same kind of study conducted today would almost certainly face immediate scrutiny rather than a four-year delay between publication and backlash.
What is striking about the current reaction is its retroactive nature. The study was public. The stories were published. The research paper was available online. None of this was hidden. Yet the gap between the study's quiet reception in 2022 and the furious response now shows how rapidly the conversation around AI has shifted among creative professionals. What was once an academic curiosity has become, for many writers, a flashpoint.
The call to boycott all thirteen participants, including the author who used no AI-generated text, reflects the depth of feeling in the writing community. It also raises a question worth flagging: whether taking part in a disclosed, time-limited research study years before the current backlash began is something that should carry professional consequences. The study happened before consumer AI tools were widely available, and Google's own approach to sharing AI research has since reversed. Those facts add layers of context that the current outrage does not fully account for.
The broader context here is a creative community still figuring out where collaboration ends and complicity begins, in an industry where the technology has moved far faster than the rules meant to govern it. The Wordcraft participants worked under secrecy agreements with a company that has since changed its research-sharing practices, using a tool built on an AI model that has since been replaced. Whether looking back at that participation and judging it years later is proportionate is a question the writing community will have to settle for itself. What is clear is that the fault lines exposed by this episode are not going away. The next study of this kind, if one happens, will be scrutinized in real time rather than discovered years after the fact.
