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Book piracy and AI chatbots
Authors have signed an open letter urging the CEOs of tech companies such as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and others to gain permission from creators before using their copyrighted works to train AI large language models and compensate writers for using their work for AI development. Other writers plan to take these companies to court, claiming that they stole copyrighted works through “shadow libraries” which hold hundreds of thousands of pirated e-books, articles, and academic texts. An unnamed author claimed that Google’s Bard chatbot regenerated the text in their book “verbatim,” and could thus affect their sales and profession.
