Michael Connelly takes on AI – in fiction and in real life

Michael Connelly scratches his head at the thought his latest book mimics his own life a little too closely. For the author of more than 40 gritty crime thrillers set in Los Angeles, it can’t be a comforting notion.

The Proving Ground brings back former defence lawyer Mickey Haller, the “Lincoln Lawyer”, who represents a woman suing a tech company whose artificial intelligence chatbot, she says, encouraged a teenage boy to kill her daughter.

But while he was writing the book, his own real-life lawsuit against AI was brewing.

Connelly is one of 12 authors in a class action – including Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and John Grisham – suing OpenAI for copyright infringement after their books were used without consent or compensation to train AI language models.

Michael Connelly is taking the fight to big tech.Credit:

“To me it’s a copyright thing, I liken it to piracy,” Connelly says. “It’s Mickey who calls AI the Wild West in the book because there’s no guidelines, there’s no regulations for this; Open AI thought it was suitable to take 41 books by Michael Connelly and throw them into the training of their AI chatbots without even telling me, or asking me – there’s something that’s not right about that.”

Connelly is hopeful the many copyright lawsuits against big tech companies will lead to some regulation. In September, the courts delivered the biggest win to authors so far when Anthropic settled a class action suit before trial for $1.5 billion – the largest copyright payout in US history, delivering $3000 to about 500,000 authors.

In a fact-is-stranger-than-fiction scenario, Connelly’s latest book was also inspired by news headlines.

Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch in the TV series Bosch.Credit: SBS

“I’ve been gathering string on it for a little bit,” Connelly says. “A few years ago there was this case in the UK where a teenager jumped over the wall at Windsor Castle with a bow and arrow and was there to shoot the Queen. In the resulting prosecution, it was revealed that he was encouraged to do that by an AI chatbot that he had a long relationship with.

“Then, last year there was a lawsuit filed in Florida against an AI company in which another teenager got into a deep, and even romantic, relationship with his chatbot, which encouraged him to commit suicide. His parents sued the company.

“I was able to get a copy of the lawsuit filing and it had probably more than 50 pages of transcripts of the conversation the kid had with his chatbot. When I read those, I knew this could be a pretty interesting story.”

The Proving Ground is the eighth book in the Lincoln Lawyer series and will no doubt provide fuel for future episodes of the Netflix series of the same name, which has been signed off for a fourth season.

Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer Netflix series.Credit: Netflix

Connelly has sold more than 89 million copies of his books worldwide, but his empire continues to expand on the screen, too. He largely paved the way for fellow crime authors like Lee Child and James Patterson to have their books adapted for streaming television when the first season of Bosch aired on Amazon Prime in 2014 starring Titus Welliver as Connelly’s popular homicide detective, Harry Bosch. When it ended seven seasons later, it was Prime’s longest-running series.

The Proving Ground is the eighth in the Lincoln Lawyer series. Credit:

A spinoff called Bosch: Legacy, which mostly follows Bosch’s daughter Maddie into the police force, has an audience rating of 100 per cent on film and television ratings site, Rotten Tomatoes across its three seasons. Another spinoff, Ballard, was launched this year on Prime Video based on Connelly’s LA detective, Renee Ballard, who works cold cases with a retired Harry Bosch. It has already been picked up for a second season.

Connelly puts his book-to-screen success down to luck, and being present; he is a regular visitor to the writers’ room and on set during filming.

It was recently announced another Bosch spinoff will start filming on the streets of Los Angeles in February called Bosch: Start of Watch. It will follow Bosch as a rookie patrol officer in 1992, an important year for LA marked by the Rodney King riots.

“I want to write stories that are very contemporary and include what is happening in the world and in this community,” he says, adding he went back and re-wrote a large part of The Proving Ground to include a sub-plot on the devastating Palisades fires in which the author lost his Malibu home. “It all ends up in my books … it would be no different with what’s going on with ICE raids in Los Angeles at the moment.

“It’s not a big part [of the next book] but it is a part; there’s a vineyard on Catalina Island that can’t get people to pick grapes because they are all in hiding or they’ve been deported.

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“My books are entertainment, I don’t want to tell anybody how to think but I do like to plant questions – ‘This is what’s going on in our society, is this what you, the reader, wants?’”

At 69, Connelly is not about to slow down. The Proving Ground is his second book released this year. In May, he also brought us Nightshade, which introduced us to a new character, Detective Stillwell based on Catalina Island off the coast near Los Angeles. And he has already submitted his next book to publishers, building on the Detective Stillwell series.

‘I just live book to book because that’s what keeps them very contemporary’

But true Connelly fans have only one question – what is happening to Harry Bosch? Connelly has always insisted he age the now-retired LA homicide detective – who we met in 1992 – in real life. That would make him 75 now.

“No, no plan,” he says but adds he has written the first chapter of a book he wants to be a Harry Bosch story. “I want to keep him going. I don’t know when I’ll be finished writing about him.

“I really just live book to book because that’s what keeps them very contemporary.”

The Proving Ground is out now through Allen and Unwin

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