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Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
Entertainment
Emily St. Martin

9,000 authors rebuke AI companies, saying they exploited books as 'food' for chatbots

More than 9,000 authors are calling out the tech companies behind generative AI in an open letter that states there is an inherent injustice in exploiting copyright-protected works to train chatbots without consent, credit or compensation.

If users prompt GPT-4 to summarize works by Roxane Gay or Margaret Atwood, it can do so in detail, chapter by chapter. If users want ChatGPT to write a story in the style of an acclaimed author such as Maya Angelou, they can ask it to "write a personal essay in the style of Maya Angelou, exploring the theme of self-discovery and personal growth." And voila.

The generative AI is powered by two software programs known as large language models, which forgo a traditional programming method and instead extract massive amounts of text in order to produce natural and lifelike responses to user prompts.

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