‘Biggest act of copyright theft in history’: thousands of Australian books allegedly used to train AI model

Books that appeared to be affected by the copyright infringement include Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

Thousands of books from some of Australia’s most celebrated authors have potentially been caught up in what Booker prize-winning novelist Richard Flanagan has called “the biggest act of copyright theft in history”.

The works have allegedly been pirated by the US-based Books3 dataset and used to train generative AI for corporations such as Meta and Bloomberg.