Pirating my books to train artificial intelligence? This is war

I’m facing the nihilistic march of the tech bro, who’s hunting this writer down. Picture: istock

I set this column as a marker point – October, 2023 – and who knows where to from here. Man the blazicades, storm the blasticles: this is war. Ahead, to the death, inventiveness and honesty and dazzle that cannot be machine-replicated or sold or reaped; ahead, concocted words that discombobulate the robotic little AI demon and stop it in its tracks. Thwart. One step ahead, my friend, one step ahead. You’ll always be chasing this tail.

Because I’m facing the nihilistic march of the tech bro, who’s hunting this writer down. I’ve recently learnt that the US-based Books3 has pirated several of my books – my honesty, memories, soul – to train generative AI for big boy corporations like Bloomberg and Meta. All, entirely, illegally. I don’t see a cent. I’m caught in a trap, without even realising it was right in front of me. Books3 is a “shadow library” of pirated books that has Big Tech licking its lips. Several lawsuits have already been taken out, by authors, against AI companies. US novelist Michael Chabon is leading class actions against OpenAI and Meta.

One of my oldest books and one of my newest have been thieved. The span of a career. Some of my most audacious writing; daring, and crafted (I worked those sentences, draft after draft, perhaps 20 times with the newer book.) All of it deeply personal. One fiction, one non-fiction, both painfully exploring the heart of the female condition. Now AI has them both, to shamelessly reap, thieve, strip, mine. And those tech bros made sure to get my most personal work, of course. One about female sexuality at its most vulnerable and honest (The Bride Stripped Bare) and the other about the suicide of my mother (After).

The Bride Stripped Bare.

After.

The nub of me, the nub of womanhood, of the female condition. I can still remember the gulp, writing both, of Can I actually do this, say this? Commit these words to the page; they feel too alive, potent, dangerous. The sentences true but utterly exposing, indicting, revealing. Terrifying but necessary.

My life project: to explore what it is to be female, in this bewildering, beautiful world. And Big Tech wants to suck the marrow out of my words, for its own profit, and not pay me a cent. It’s chilling, enraging, the brink of war –and I want arts minister Tony Burke to fight for all the writers whose words, like mine, have been shamelessly thieved.

Yet will the world call out the heartless tech bros or are we already too much in their thrall? Gods as monsters, monsters as gods, as we worship their macho thrust, greed, nihilistic audacity, wealth. Meanwhile, Don Winslow tweets, “A new Authors Guild survey finds that median book and writing-related income for authors in 2022 was below the poverty level.” Why on Earth do we write? Because we have to. Want to. Must. For all of us.

The counter-attack is threefold. One: I don’t want my writing stolen in a blatant theft of copyright; I want to be paid for my labour. Two: I don’t want my work stolen so I have no control over my future career, and may come up hard against my own name on words in the future that I didn’t write myself. Three: I want great writing, great writers – who get to the heart of the human condition, who make us feel less alone – to endure.

Italo Calvino wrote: “Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every life.” The novel is where we humans dive deep, deepest, and Big Tech will never triumph over that. Meanwhile, the writer runs from the hounds yapping at its heels. The risk-taker, the explorer, the adventurer in their curiosity cloak, running, running in this shamed new world. Master Controller of AI, could you write this column, in my voice, and fool you all? And if it ultimately wins, well, who would want to be us? Who would choose this, as a profession?