Around 8,500 authors, many of them household names, have signed an open letter to leaders in the generative artificial intelligence industry telling them either to compensate them for their work or to leave it alone.

The list of names in the letter includes award-winning authors, arguably the most famous writers in the world today. That includes Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and James Patterson. The letter, published by the Author’s Guild, is addressed to the chief executives of Open AI LP, Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc. Stability AI Ltd., IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp., all presently scrapping to lead the generative AI market.

The authors don’t mince their words, calling the use of their work an “inherent injustice” as the companies’ AI systems scrape their words without “consent, credit, or compensation.” The letter states that generative AI tools owe their “existence to our writings,” which is actually only partially true given that large language models, or LLMs, work on myriad data sets. Just recently, Reddit Inc., one of the world’s busiest forums, also expressed its discontent with data being scraped from its platform for free.

“These technologies mimic and regurgitate our language, stories, style, and ideas,” said the letter. “Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry provide the ‘food’ for AI systems, endless meals for which there has been no bill. You’re spending billions of dollars to develop AI technology. It is only fair that you compensate us for using our writings, without which AI would be banal and extremely limited.”

The authors expressed that more salt is being rubbed into their fresh wounds since, according to them, much of the data scraped from their books comes from “notorious” piracy websites. The authors explained that such systems are presently in the process of flooding the internet with “mediocre” machine-written stories, fiction and nonfiction. This comes at a time when authors’ wages have been in a steep decline across just about all forms of professional writing.

The Brave New World of AI is not what was expected when tech companies talked about AI and automation a few years ago. The current joke goes something along the lines of, “Wasn’t AI supposed to take all the mundane jobs?” Writers, as well as digital artists and musicians, have tried to fight back, but copyright laws don’t protect their work when their work becomes a simulation of sorts, not the real thing. The writers of the letter have three demands:

• Obtain permission for use of our copyrighted material in your generative AI programs.
• Compensate writers fairly for the past and ongoing use of our works in your generative AI programs.
• Compensate writers fairly for the use of our works in AI output, whether or not the outputs are infringing under current law.

Right now, it’s hard to see how a writer or publisher will be able to ascertain if a certain person’s writing has been used in a dataset. It’s likely, or at least possible, that new legislation will be created concerning this matter.

Photo: Patrick Fore/Unsplash