Bryn Greenwood had an inkling her books were being used to train generative artificial intelligence chatbots — such as OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT. But it wasn’t until earlier this year that she was able to confirm that her books had indeed been stolen.
“To see for sure that they had been used to program AI was really a gut punch, to just know that my stuff was taken without my permission,” said Greenwood, who wrote the 2016 New York Times-bestselling novel “All the Ugly and Wonderful Things."
And Greenwood isn’t the only author in this position. In fact, it would be hard to find a published author from the last 20 years who hasn’t had their work pirated to train AI, according to Alex Reisner, a programmer and contributing writer for The Atlantic.
In 2023, Reisner broke the story that exposed the sheer scale of AI’s pirated books problem, and it was his work that made it possible for Greenwood to locate her books in the database that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, used to train AI.
In recent years, several class-action lawsuits have been filed against Meta and other companies for copyright infringement. Some big names, like Sarah Silverman, have joined the fight.
“They feel that their work is now being used against them,” Reisner explained on KCUR's Up To Date. “So you know, not only has their work been taken without payment, it's being used to generate works that will compete with the books that they're trying to sell.”
And that’s exactly how Greenwood feels. She’s about to publish a new book, and feels discouraged knowing it will get stolen as soon as it gets online.
She also worries for readers.
“It horrifies me, because I think if AI gets hold and there are no regulations over it, future generations are not just going to lose the stories that they would tell — they're going to lose the stories that they would read,” she said.
Reisner said there’s already evidence that writers, artists and musicians are sharing their work online less, and he believes that in the long run, this could have a chilling effect on culture.
But he doesn’t expect there to be any sweeping regulations put in place on AI anytime soon.
“One reason is the courts are just very slow, and there are good reasons for that, but another reason is that, you know, the technology is still really young, and we don't really know all the ways that it's going to be used,” he said.
For now, Greenwood and other authors have to hope that these mounting lawsuits will amount to something tangible.
- Alex Reisner, programmer and contributing writer for The Atlantic
- Bryn Greenwood, author
