Pirate books probably used to train AI models

Millions of books have been sent to Libgen, an illegal pirate site that is said to have been accessed by technology giants, including Meta and Openai.

New Zealand Authors Society You Puni Kaituhu the President Dr. Vanda Symon said that a newly -launched research tool for United States magazine The Atlantic He indicated that more than 7.5 million books could be involved, although not sure that all these work was downloaded directly by AI companies.

Thousands of books from New Zealand writers were included in the last intellectual property theft by “Big Tech”.

Local writers, who earned an average of about $ 16,000 a year in their work, had been deprived of potential revenue.

“Big Tech can afford to pay license fees to authors and editors to legally use the content needed to train their AI language models.”

The goal and other AI companies knew exactly what they were doing, but it seemed that they prefer to steal this content than to ask and pay for his use, Symon said.

These companies could have paid for licenses, but they trusted pirate texts.

Society was gathering a list of all books in New Zealand affected by the latest instance of mass piracy.

Worldwide, the copyright law was being reviewed and updated to combat AI’s development and intellectual property rights.

In New Zealand, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment planned to progress in formal consultation in 2025 with creative industries and public copyright legislation, including AI, something that was “proven urgent”.

New Zealand’s Authors’ Chief Executive Jenny Nagle said it strongly condemned the appropriation of the intellectual property of the authors of New Zealand.

“This unauthorized use is Big Tech’s intellectual property theft that violates existing legislation.

“The imbalance of power among individual authors defending their property rights versus great money from technology and power is alarming.”

Unauthorized use of work was legally indefensible and amoral, she said.

“For the creative industries of Aotearoa to prosper, we need robust copyright laws, protections, and appropriate application mechanisms and violation penalties.”

Society encouraged writers to use The AtlanticThe on -line search tool to verify that your titles have been included.

Some advice they had to the writers were sending a letter to the goal companies and other AI companies, stating that they did not have the right to use their books, add a “AI training” warning on the worksput page and certify human authorship in publications.

sam.henderson@thestar.co.nz