LLMs are theft by 'absolute scum' who make life harder for writers by putting them in copyright peril
Two prominent science fiction authors have decried the impact of AI on their craft."I do not want or need a large language model to write my fiction for me. I write fiction compulsively – before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist – so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?" wrote Charles Stross in a Saturday post. Stross graciously mentioned The Register in his Laundry Files novels."I maintain that any serious author should shun LLMs like the plague," he added. "Did I mention the 'stealing' thing? This isn't hyperbole: I'm one of the parties to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating eBooks to train their LLMs."
"That's not my only grievance, either. You may have noticed this blog performing sluggishly or crapping out from time to time over the past few months. That's because my server is old and feeble and periodically gets swarmed by Chinese and other foreign botnets scraping data for training LLMs."
Stross labelled AI companies "absolute scum.""They're stealing copyrighted material to train an LLM that is intended to compete for revenue with the authors of the works they stole, and they're fine-tuning their LLMs to make them as addictive as possible in order to maximize future revenue once they pivot to token sales as their main source of income," he wrote."In other words, they're no different from a burglar who robs you one day then comes round to sell you your stuff back the next morning. Back in the 18th century we used to hang people like that and Sam Altman makes me question the wisdom of having stopped."Scalzi, whose best-known works include the Old Man's War series and Hugo Award-winning novel Redshirts, on Friday commented on a recent article about a hotly tipped debut novel being pulled from publishing and film or television consideration over concerns that AI had been used to write it."The issue appears not to be that 'AI' material isn't copyrightable, the issue is that 'AI' is trained on copyrighted material, so prose generated from it could be contested by the original copyright holders," Scalzi wrote.He expects publishers to look for signs of AI use, although the available detection tools are notoriously unreliable. He predicts that this will disadvantage new writers who lack a body of work dating from before the arrival of ChatGPT."Which is unfair," Scalzi wrote. "It's especially unfair when the makers of the tools writers use to write – I'm looking at you, Microsoft and Google – are frantically stuffing 'AI' tools into the programs writers rely on."Then Scalzi dispensed with the diplomatic language.
