Thousands of Australian books have been found on a pirated dataset of ebooks, known as Books3, used to train generative AI. Richard Flanagan, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Tim Flannery are among the leading local authors affected – along, of course, with writers from around the world.
A search tool published by the Atlantic makes it possible for authors to find out whether their books are among the nearly 200,000 in the Books3 dataset.
Many of these writers have reacted angrily about their works being included in these datasets without their knowledge or consent. Flanagan told the Guardian, “I felt as if my soul had been strip mined and I was powerless to stop it”.
