Novelists deserve to be paid for training AI

Tech giants used pirated books to train their large-language models, but that doesn’t mean you can ask ChatGPT for your own personalised Margaret Atwood story, says Nicole Kobie.

Step aside Margaret Atwood and Stephen King, here’s a dystopian horror story for you: imagine spending years of your life toiling over a keyboard, carefully crafting sentences, paragraphs and chapters of a book that weaves together a plot, brings characters to life and enthralls readers for hundreds of pages. Now, watch as an AI eats it and spits your garbled works back at you. Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT brought large language models (LLMs) to the wider world’s attention, it’s been suspected that writers’ work has been used to train them. LLMs are deep-learning systems with hundreds of millions of parameters that are taught to assemble sentences by hoovering up massive text datasets. Datasets such as most of the English-language internet, including Wikipedia. Writers are speaking up. In June 2023, the…

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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, December 2023

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