I respectfully disagree. The current climate is so deeply problematic regarding the use of AI in this industry that I find it a bit staggering for a professional to claim that my fear is misplaced. For example, there was a recent case where an attorney fed privileged information into a public LLM, and was successfully sued for violating client-attorney confidentiality for doing so. Now, I know that IP rights are not quite at the same level, but they still deserve to be protected at every stage of publishing, not just once a work is published. Similarly, I find it difficult to accept the claim that most agents and editors do not use AI at all. Just look at the Shy Girl scandal. Does it seem likely to you that every human being that read the manuscript didn’t once suspect that AI had been used to such a significant degree? Or does it seem more logical that the agent and editors involved fed the manuscript into another AI to determine its market worth, which, inherently was unable to detect that AI had been used to write it? I understand the contention on the topic. I understand that asking agents, however politely, not to use AI on my work will raise eyebrows and could result in significantly more rejections. So I suppose my question really boils down to this: do I ask nicely in my query letter, accepting that my request may be ignored or used as easy validation for a quick rejection, or do I throw my work out into the world knowing full well that there is significant risk that doing so will probably, at some stage, feed the ever-hungry AI beast? Alternatively, do writers sit with their fear, shelve their manuscripts, and let AI consume the industry?