Meanwhile: the guy who created this whole mess is still selling subscriptions to his Shaxpir…
The tl;dr: A guy is selling subscriptions to an AI-based software tool to “help you write better novels.” And to train it, he’s used tens of thousands of novels from authors you know, without those authors giving him permission.
…Sometimes things seem to blow up with unusual speed. This particular shit seems to have hit the fan yesterday, primarily on Twitter, when various authors discovered the guy’s website, prosecraft.io. This site featured “clippings” of writing from the authors he’d stolen from… and the revelation that he had scraped their entire books, not just excerpts, to train his AI. (“2,470,720,986 words,” his website bragged, “from 27,668 books, by 15,622 authors.” The only authors who were off limits, apparently, were people using [or paying for] his software.) Though the guy hastily took prosecraft.io down when the online explosions began, if you take a look at this Google search you can see the covers of just some of the books the entire contents of which he exploited for AI training.
This usage goes well beyond the “fair use” defense that he belatedly (and ineffectively) attempted to employ on Twitter. It’s straightforward copyright infringement, on a massive scale: good old-fashioned theft.
Gizmodo has a goodish breakdown of the broad situation here. AV Club also has one here.
The only upside to this sorry situation is that, at the legal end of things, this guy is certainly about to get nuked from orbit… because all those authors’ full-text works will still be in the guts of the guy’s AI, which is being used by him for commercial purposes. (Among the authors he made the gross tactical error of stealing from: Stephen King, James Patterson, the Pratchett Estate, and Nora Roberts. This… is not going to go well for him.)
Leverage’s John Rogers sums it up succinctly:
ALT
Meanwhile: the guy who created this whole mess is still selling subscriptions to his Shaxpir software (I’m not adding the URL here) that he trained using stolen goods. So—until someone stops him—you might like to reblog this info for the attention of others here who prefer their writing to stay human-made as well as -fueled, and not to support the seriously ethically-challenged.
Hi, yeah, that’s the guy who scraped my book, for the prosecraft.io portion of his portfolio. THAT was supposed to lure people into using & paying for Shaxpir. My suspicion is he got a lot of these titles as part of the mass scraping of Internet Archive that swamped its severs and crashed the site a while back.
THAT has been a concern of mine for a while with the archive itself. Even for legally aquired work that’s *not* in public domain safeguards against scraping really aren’t there.
The Shaxpir dude “took down” the prosecraft.io (which is what people were first flipping about), where I found my stuff had been used, but has made NO claim about what he intends to do with the data, you know–THE ACTUAL WORKS HE SCRAPED. The intent all along seemed to be to use it for Shaxpir, for a premium subscription thing. Which means, BOOM, making money off other people’s work that was taken without consent. To train his “AI.”
One thing, you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT FUCK WITH NORA ROBERTS. Of literally every living author whose work you might fuck around with you do NOT touch NORA FUCKING ROBERTS. Your ass will be sued back to your primordial state. On a multinational level. From the UK side, The Society of Authors is investigating. From the US side, The Authors’ Guild is looking into it.
Of course his claim will be “fair use” which is incredibly hard to prove. When you claim it, it’s a DEFENSE, so you’re already starting from behind. Then, say you’re against Nora Roberts, who keeps no small part of publishing afloat, and some incredibly litigious Big 5 houses with so much money to burn they can let their entire staff strike for months on end without really thinking about it because HOOOOLY COW.
Uh. You do not want to go to court on that. You want to take all your shit down, eat the document, and go live in a hole.
And once more, for the record, and for anyone ever contemplating attempting shenanigans: YOU DO NOT FUCK WITH NORA ROBERTS. EVER.
Wow
