Featuring the BookTok Debate That’s Splitting the Community
As someone who’s grown up devouring novels, savouring every twist, turn and meticulously crafted sentence, there’s something quietly unsettling about watching artificial intelligence step into the world of fiction. I’m not just talking about AI writing tools or the occasional experiment with chatbots. I mean apps like Character.AI, where you can have conversations with simulated versions of fictional characters, often pulled straight from the pages of your favourite books, TV shows, and films.
At first glance, it might seem harmless, even fun. What’s the harm in talking to a bot that mimics Mr. Darcy or Kaz Brekker? But for those of us who care deeply about storytelling and respect the work of authors, there’s a growing discomfort. These tools are starting to blur the lines between fandom and something more legally and ethically fraught: unlicensed, AI-driven appropriation.
Creativity Without Credit
The heart of the issue is this: many of these AI-powered apps are trained on existing copyrighted works such as novels, scripts, fanfiction, and character databases without the explicit permission of the authors. That means creators, whose original characters and worlds are being repurposed, often see none of the benefits. Their intellectual labour is used to fuel simulations that people engage with as though they’re extensions of the original story.
Worse still, these chatbots can produce entirely new dialogue and scenarios using the voice of an existing character. That kind of mimicry might feel like fandom at first—but it’s inching toward a creative grey zone. If AI is allowed to expand a fictional universe without the author’s consent, what does that mean for storytelling? For world-building? For the value of originality?
A Real-Time BookTok Flashpoint
This issue came to a head recently when a TikTok post by popular BookTok creator @mariannasreads sparked outrage. The video, which many interpreted as supporting or defending the use of AI-generated content that mimics fictional characters, ignited a wider debate. Marianna didn’t explicitly condone plagiarism, but her post highlighted how common (and casually accepted) AI fan interactions have become.
Author Rachel Gillig (One Dark Window) responded, not by directly naming anyone, but with a simple, cutting TikTok captioned:
“Write it yourself, babe!” – https://www.tiktok.com/@rachelgilligbooks/photo/7519913239191326007?lang=en
This could potentially be a dig, but is a message. A reminder that loving a story means respecting its creator. In a follow-up post, Gillig added:
“I see so much AI ‘art’ on this app and it truly saddens me.”
Together, these posts captured what many authors and long-time readers have been feeling: a growing unease with how AI is being used in literary spaces, not to support or explore creativity, but to replicate and repurpose it without permission, credit, or understanding.
Legal Grey Areas, But Not for Long
Legally, we’re in murky waters. Copyright law was never designed with AI in mind. In most jurisdictions, characters are protected if they’re distinctive enough, and derivative works (like adaptations, spinoffs, or yes, AI-generated character simulations) require author approval. But AI conversations tend to fall through the cracks. Interactive, not formally published and attributed to a machine, not a person.
Still, the legal landscape is shifting. Lawsuits are beginning to pile up. The New York Times authors like Sarah Silverman and Paul Tremblay, and others have filed cases against AI developers for unauthorised use of their work to train language models. These cases matter because they ask a critical question: Is it legal or ethical for AI companies to mine human creativity to feed machine output?
For authors like Gillig, the current reality is clear: their ideas, voices, and intellectual property are being used without consent. And for many, that feels like theft, regardless of what the law currently states.
What’s Lost When the Machine Writes Back
For readers like me, the magic of a great story is in its singular vision. You can feel the hand of the author in every sentence, the rhythm of their voice, the emotional weight of a carefully written scene, the subtle threads that tie character arcs together.
AI can mimic that voice. It can generate pages of dialogue that sound like Sarah J. Maas or Leigh Bardugo. But it doesn’t understand the “why” behind those choices. It doesn’t know the pain behind a character’s silence or the weight of a turning point built over three books. It just guesses. And sometimes, it guesses wrong; creatively, thematically and even offensively.
Even more troubling is how these AI-generated interactions are being shared as if they’re canon. Especially among younger readers, there’s a risk that AI “versions” of a character could be mistaken for the real thing or even credited to the author who had no part in their creation.
We Can Love Technology Without Losing the Plot
Let me be clear: I’m not anti-technology. AI can be useful. It can help writers brainstorm, improve accessibility, and even generate prompts. But the line between supporting creativity and replacing it is incredibly thin and often crossed for the sake of novelty or convenience.
As readers, we have power. We can choose to support authors, not imitations. We can engage thoughtfully with technology, asking where content came from, who it benefits, and whether it honours the spirit of the story it borrows from.
Fan culture has always been a beautiful thing, filled with love, imagination and community. But love without respect is not real love. If we truly care about the books that shape us, then we owe their authors something more than mimicry. We owe them our trust, our thanks, and sometimes, a little patience to “write it themselves.”
Carys Bello, Head of Social Media at Fellows and Associates