Brian Pinkerton's Blog - Posts Tagged "artificial-intelligence"
A.I. is stealing my novels to feed bogus books by fake authors
The Atlantic recently exposed a database of books being used to train A.I. and populate A.I.’s content library, which enables anyone to create, distribute and sell derivative works assembled from the creative efforts of others without their permission or compensation. This is also known as theft.
I gained access to the database and searched it to see if any of my own books were included. And the answer was yes. A.I. systems by Meta and others are offering up the concepts and elements of two of my novels as ingredients to anyone who wants to push a few buttons and spit out an instant book and sell it on Amazon under the false pretense of their own original work.
Apparently, A.I. is collecting its knowledge base from pirated books floating around on the internet. This creates multiple layers of theft that is a nightmare for an individual author to untangle.
I’m not a robot. I’m a human being who spends thousands of hours creating original stories from my own blood, sweat and tears. The thought that my labor is feeding someone else’s false credits – and bank account – is hugely upsetting. I know I’m not alone, judging from the ire of my fellow writer friends.
What happens when an author’s ARC is pirated and enters the A.I. library before the original work even comes out? (An ARC is an Advance Reading Copy, sent to reviewers and booksellers ahead of a book’s publication.) Someone could quickly construct a knockoff of a new Stephen King novel before King’s novel reaches the general public. They could slap their name on the copycat work as “author,” self-publish and immediately put it up for sale without ever taking the time to actually read the work they allegedly wrote.
Amazon is already facing a glut of A.I.-generated novels, especially in more formulaic categories, like Romance. As long as the cover art looks decent, the general public won’t necessarily recognize the difference. Amazon gets a cut of the profits either way. The losers, of course, are genuine authors who will see their sales and readership diluted in the flood of A.I.-composed books.
One of the outcomes of the recent Hollywood writers strike was an agreement that studios will not base movies on A.I.-created content. But how will they know what’s legit and what’s been secretly automated by a lazy wannabe writer?
Readers will suffer, too. The end result of all this will be a sharp rise in unoriginal works lacking in any real imagination or individual expression. Books will be based on content that reaches backward not forward. That will get dull fast.
You’re probably wondering which two books of mine have been sucked into the A.I. machinery. I’m not going to say. That would be like a rock band telling you which of their albums can be downloaded for free on BitTorrent. But I will share this much: interestingly, they are two of my horror novels. The A.I. bots steered clear of my “evils of high tech” sci-fi thrillers. Perhaps they chose not to perpetuate that particular narrative.
I gained access to the database and searched it to see if any of my own books were included. And the answer was yes. A.I. systems by Meta and others are offering up the concepts and elements of two of my novels as ingredients to anyone who wants to push a few buttons and spit out an instant book and sell it on Amazon under the false pretense of their own original work.
Apparently, A.I. is collecting its knowledge base from pirated books floating around on the internet. This creates multiple layers of theft that is a nightmare for an individual author to untangle.
I’m not a robot. I’m a human being who spends thousands of hours creating original stories from my own blood, sweat and tears. The thought that my labor is feeding someone else’s false credits – and bank account – is hugely upsetting. I know I’m not alone, judging from the ire of my fellow writer friends.
What happens when an author’s ARC is pirated and enters the A.I. library before the original work even comes out? (An ARC is an Advance Reading Copy, sent to reviewers and booksellers ahead of a book’s publication.) Someone could quickly construct a knockoff of a new Stephen King novel before King’s novel reaches the general public. They could slap their name on the copycat work as “author,” self-publish and immediately put it up for sale without ever taking the time to actually read the work they allegedly wrote.
Amazon is already facing a glut of A.I.-generated novels, especially in more formulaic categories, like Romance. As long as the cover art looks decent, the general public won’t necessarily recognize the difference. Amazon gets a cut of the profits either way. The losers, of course, are genuine authors who will see their sales and readership diluted in the flood of A.I.-composed books.
One of the outcomes of the recent Hollywood writers strike was an agreement that studios will not base movies on A.I.-created content. But how will they know what’s legit and what’s been secretly automated by a lazy wannabe writer?
Readers will suffer, too. The end result of all this will be a sharp rise in unoriginal works lacking in any real imagination or individual expression. Books will be based on content that reaches backward not forward. That will get dull fast.
You’re probably wondering which two books of mine have been sucked into the A.I. machinery. I’m not going to say. That would be like a rock band telling you which of their albums can be downloaded for free on BitTorrent. But I will share this much: interestingly, they are two of my horror novels. The A.I. bots steered clear of my “evils of high tech” sci-fi thrillers. Perhaps they chose not to perpetuate that particular narrative.
