Boy Swallows Universe author Trent Dalton wanted to ‘vomit’ when told his books were on pirate database

Best-selling author Trent Dalton felt ‘ill’ when told 10 of his books were on a pirate site used for AI modelling.

When Trent Dalton was told this week that 10 editions of his books were on a pirate site used to train technology giant Meta’s AI platform, the best-selling author “wanted to vomit”.

“It’s staggering,” the acclaimed Brisbane writer said, adding he had not given permission for his titles – which often draw on deeply personal, painful stories – to be on Library Genesis, an illegal trove of millions of books and articles that originated in Russia, and, according to US court filings, has been used by Meta.

“Looking over that list of titles makes me ill,’’ said Dalton, author of the acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel turned play and Netflix series Boy Swallows Universe.

“I feel like I just came home to find my house robbed. There’s nothing in my house as valuable to me as the real human thought and the deep human feeling that I put into those books that these literary looters have plundered … That’s how personal it is for me. I describe it (plundering authors’ books for artificial-intelligence models) as creepy.’’

Dalton’s childhood was scarred by domestic violence, drug abuse and alcoholism – his mother used and sold heroin and was jailed – and Boy Swallows Universe reflects that trauma through the character Frankie Bell, partly based on Dalton’s mum.

“My mum was not able to give her four sons anything in life, but one thing she gave her youngest son was her story; and that was a cracking story,’’ he told The Australian.

Dalton added his voice to the swelling chorus of writers and singer-songwriters outraged by a Productivity Commission proposal that could allow big tech companies to gain access to copyrighted Australian content – from hit rock songs to plays and novels – to build their AI platforms, without compensating the creators.

The Productivity Commission’s interim report on “unlocking the benefits of AI and data to spark growth”, was released this week and included a policy option to create a new fair-dealing exception under the Copyright Act to permit “text and data mining” by technology giants.

Dalton said of multibillion-dollar multinationals helping themselves to books without an author’s permission or knowledge: “I’d say it’s a f..king joke if it wasn’t the most serious issue facing working Australian writers today’’.

He added that feeding valuable cultural content “into the NutriBullet that is AI just cheapens it all … and turns it into code”.

Midnight Oil frontman and former Labor minister Peter Garrett also condemned the Productivity Commission proposal as “shameful”; crime writer Michael Robotham said it was “a surrender that will cost us … our storytelling traditions” and novelist Kathy Lette said it could lead to the extinction of Australian literature.

Dalton, whose next novel, Gravity Let Me Go, is due to be released in September, has experienced how distressing unauthorised data mining can be for authors: two years ago a journalist warned him that Boy Swallows Universe had been fed into an AI machine without his knowledge. “It was such an outrageous thing because I couldn’t even pinpoint (which platform had plundered his work). I didn’t even know who to call.’’

His thoughts flew to his mum and how her story of drug addiction and imprisonment had shaped Boy Swallows Universe.

“I could not believe that this anonymous giant, this faceless bandit, could take a story that my mum lived,” Dalton said. “Like, she went to prison for that shit. She cried for five years for that story. I just kept on thinking … why don’t you come and take the pain as well; why don’t you come and take the regret … because that’s what’s in that book.’’

Dalton was this week recording an audio version of Gravity Let Me Go when The Australian informed him that 10 editions of his books were on the pirate LibGen used by Meta.

Meta’s use of pirated books and academic papers from the LibGen dataset to develop its AI model was revealed in American court documents in January. US-based Atlantic magazine then published an online tool that allowed the LibGen site to be searched for the first time.

A search by The Australian this week revealed 10 editions by Dalton were on the database, including the English language versions of his novels Boy Swallows Universe, Lola in the Mirror and All Our Shimmering Skies and his nonfiction bestseller Love Stories. Also on the site were French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch editions of Dalton’s books.

The award-winning writer, who has sold two million books, said Meta’s use of LibGen “feels like a staggeringly careless and aggressive use of power that remains, from what I can tell, dangerously unchecked”.

Books by other leading Australian authors Tim Winton (50 editions), Alexis Wright (26), Hannah Kent (23) and Helen Garner (32) have also been hoovered up into the LibGen data base.

The Australian Society of Authors said at least 1900 Australian authors and illustrators had reported that about “12,000 of their books had been pirated and used by Meta to train its generative AI tool’’. The ASA attacked the Productivity Commission idea to exempt AI from copyright laws as “unjust” and “perverse”.

ASA lawyer Josh Bornstein said that if adopted, it would “institutionalise wage theft for those working in creative industries’’.

Meta and other tech giants are grappling with several high-profile copyright infringement court cases in the US. They are invoking a defence of fair use.