The Atlantic just released a huge exposé on how Meta (the company behind Facebook, Threads, Instagram, etc.) has stolen millions of books in order to train their GenAI engines. They aren’t the first company to do so and unless we stop them, they won’t be the last. It’s not just that they stole some books, they literally scraped the entirety LibGen.

If you’re not familiar, LibGen stands for Library Genesis and serves as a library to digitize schoarly journals, articles, academic and fiction books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines.

When someone uses a program like ChatGPT to “create a book idea” or a “report on ____ topic” for them, the reason the results can sound like words a real person has written is because GenAI uses real sentences from real books & articles to parrot back some approximation of what it scraped or stole to “learn” from. I put learn in quotes because AI has not reached the point of being able to truly learn yet.

Molli worked heavily with programming AI in video games, though this AI is not the same as what folks call GenAI or Generative AI. Video game AI is based on programming that tells the game how to control characters on the screen. For example, on a very simplistic level, if you were playing a Mario game and as Mario, you began fighting known rival, Bowser, the programming or AI in the game tells Bowser how to fight against you. It looks a lot like this: if Mario throws a turtle shell, Bowser either jumps and avoids it or doesn’t jump and gets hit by it. Coded statistics and probability tell it how often it will either jump or not jump. Again, this is a simplistic explaination.

AI is used in all sorts of manners, including for things like spell and grammar check, which have existed for a long time and didn’t need to steal entire novels to work.

GenAI cannot create something new out of nothing.

If it could, companies wouldn’t need to steal other people’s writing and art in order to create. Because GenAI can only cobble together text and images from what already exists, it is reliant upon scraping and stealing from existing works in order to exist.

For example, many artist have found portions of their artwork in images “created” by MidJourney and other GenAI
“art programs.” The same can be said for writers/authors.

According to the research done by The Atlantic, five of my works were stolen by Meta to train their GenAI garbage, including Amaskan’s Blood, Joy to the Worlds: Mysterious Speculative Fiction for the Holidays, and a few shorter works.

Again, Meta is not the first company to steal my works. Google scraped by art and my novels. MidJourney and several other big name GenAI art programs stole my art.

Despite knowing that this is how these companies and programs work, I still have colleagues who use GenAI to help them “brainstorm ideas” or “design cover art,” etc. The idea that these creative folks would rely on theft to create and would use programs that if supported, could eventually make our jobs moot… Honestly, it makes me want to puke.

They claim that there’s no putting this genie back into the bottle so they might as well do like everyone else.

You know what? Bullshit. That kind of thinking is exactly why we are where we are as a country here in the United States. Just because everyone’s committing crimes, you will too?

NO.

The Authors’ Guild as well as the Big 5 publishers are all suing these companies for theft and copyright violation, but in our current political climate here in the US, I don’t see this ending well for creatives.

So what can we do?

• Stop using GenAI.
• Stop supporting creatives who use it.
• If you can, stop using and supporting companies who embed it into their programs. (I know, this is easier said than done. Do what you can.)

Seriously, if an author is using GenAI created cover art, speak out! Point out the problems with this to the publisher or author if they are indie. If they are using ChatGPT and other programs to brainstorm their books or write first drafts, speak out! If they defend using theft to “create,” stop buying their books or art.

Personally, the only way I see us winning this fight is to make using GenAI unprofitable for companies.

Back to writing books and making art someone else is going to steal so they can make a meme or brainstorm a story. *sigh*