AI Training: What Every Author Needs to Know about Book Piracy

A great hullabaloo arose in Author World over an article recently published by The Atlantic. It blows open the extent to which companies like Meta are using pirated books to train their AI models. LibGen is the pirated books data base and it now houses millions of books and scientific papers stolen from their creators. LibGen’s roots are Russian and they move their domain around as they get shut down. The article includes a model where authors can enter their name or book title to see if it’s there.

My middle grade novel, The Silk Road is on the list of titles pirated by LibGen for use in AI training as well as a number of titles written by author friends of mine and I wasn’t pleased. However, I did find some resources to share so other authors can arm themselves somewhat.

What you can do to protect yourself and your work from piracy

The Authors’ Guild has a good article on what to do when AI uses your books for training.  And this is what the Writers’ Union of Canada is doing.

What I’m specifically doing

This is now in the footer of my website:

“All rights reserved. All content on this website is protected by copyright. Reproduction, distribution, or use of any material, including by artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies, is strictly prohibited without the author’s explicit written permission.”

And this is going on the copyright page of all of my future releases:

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. Use of this content for machine learning, AI training, or data mining purposes, is strictly prohibited. For permission requests, contact …

I don’t know if either of these inclusions are going to truly protect my work. LibGen has no respect for copyright law as it stands. But it’s the best I can do for now.

BTW Meta has roughly 48 BILLION dollars in revenue each quarter and they can’t afford to compensate authors fairly…

Sheesh, the state of the world today! 

#writing #writingcommunity #amwriting #authorcommunity