>THE Atlantic published an article last month titled *These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech*. Toward the end of the summer, Alex Reisner, the writer of that piece, had published a series of articles that revealed that a data set of books, called *Books3*, was among those being used by companies to train their generative artificial intelligence systems. In order to sound like humans, these systems need to be fed text written by humans.
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>The authors of the books included in this data set received no compensation and no royalties for the use of copyrighted works. As Reisner writes: “These authors spent years thinking, researching, imagining, and writing, and had no idea that their books were being used to train machines that could one day replace them. Meanwhile, the people building and training these machines stand to profit enormously.” Several writers in the United States have launched lawsuits claiming that this amounts to copyright infringement.
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>In Reisner’s latest article, he included a search tool: any author can check whether or not their books are being used without their consent. Reisner sums it up perfectly in the first instalment of the series: “The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.”
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>Hundreds of titles by Canadian authors, including Alice Munro, Austin Clarke, Leonard Cohen, and Miriam Toews, were listed in *Books3*. We reached out to some of them to ask how they felt about one or several of their books being included.
Bi_Shakespeare on
This should be an interesting case as to my knowledge it has absolutely no precedent ever before in copyright law.
2 Comments
>THE Atlantic published an article last month titled *These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech*. Toward the end of the summer, Alex Reisner, the writer of that piece, had published a series of articles that revealed that a data set of books, called *Books3*, was among those being used by companies to train their generative artificial intelligence systems. In order to sound like humans, these systems need to be fed text written by humans.
>
>The authors of the books included in this data set received no compensation and no royalties for the use of copyrighted works. As Reisner writes: “These authors spent years thinking, researching, imagining, and writing, and had no idea that their books were being used to train machines that could one day replace them. Meanwhile, the people building and training these machines stand to profit enormously.” Several writers in the United States have launched lawsuits claiming that this amounts to copyright infringement.
>
>In Reisner’s latest article, he included a search tool: any author can check whether or not their books are being used without their consent. Reisner sums it up perfectly in the first instalment of the series: “The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.”
>
>Hundreds of titles by Canadian authors, including Alice Munro, Austin Clarke, Leonard Cohen, and Miriam Toews, were listed in *Books3*. We reached out to some of them to ask how they felt about one or several of their books being included.
This should be an interesting case as to my knowledge it has absolutely no precedent ever before in copyright law.