Beware, all thieves and imitators of other people’s labour and talents, of laying your audacious hands upon our work.
Albrecht Dürer, 1511
I’ve remembered that quotation since it was uttered by Inspector Morse in the episode Who Killed Harry Field? Albrecht Dürer wasn’t referring to Artificial Intelligence when he said it, but it does seem pertitent to what’s going on today.
There’s an article in The Atlantic about a huge database of pirated work called LibGen that has been used by Mark Zuckerberg’s corporation Meta to train its artificial intelligence system. Instead of acquiring such materials from publishers – or, Heaven forbid, authors! – they decided simply to steal it. That’s theft on a grand scale: 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers.
The piece provides a link to LibGen so you can search for your own work there. I searched it yesterday and found 137 works by “Peter Coles”. Not all of them are by me, as there are other authors with the same name, but all my books are there, as well as numerous research articles, reviews and other pieces:
I suppose many think I should be flattered that my works are deemed to be of sufficiently high quality to be used to train a large language model, but I’m afraid I don’t see it that way at all. I think, at least for the books, this is simply theft. I understand that there may be a class action in the USA against Meta for this larceny, which I hope succeeds.
I think I should make a few points about copyright and authorship. I am a firm advocate of open access to the scientific literature, so I don’t think research articles should be under copyright. Meta can access them along with everyone else on the planet. It’s not really piracy if it’s free anyways. Although it would be courteous of Meta to acknowledge its sources, lack of courtesy is not the worst of Meta’s areas of misconduct.
In a similar vein, when I started writing this blog back in 2008 I did wonder about copyright. Over the years, quite a lot of my ramblings here have been lifted by journalists, etc. Again a bit of courtesy would have been nice. I did make the decision, however, not to bother about this as (a) it would be too much hassle to chase down every plagiarist and (b) I don’t make money from this site anyway. As far as I’m concerned as soon as I put anything on here it is in the public domain. I haven’t changed that opinion with the advent of ChatGPT etc. Indeed, I am pretty sure that all 7000+ articles from this blog were systematically scraped last year.
Books are, however, in a different category. I have never made a living from writing books, but it is dangerous to the livelihood of those that do to have their work systematically stolen in this way. I understand that there may be a class action in the USA against Meta for this blatant larceny, which I hope succeeds.
In the Dark 