The work of many Irish writers has been reported to have been used without permission to train AI. Photograph: iStockis telling me down the line from America. “St Colmcille copied a manuscript and everybody said, ‘that’s great, thank you’, but he said, ‘no, no, I’m taking my copy away’. And there was this enormous conference and a big monk had to make the decision ‘who owns the copy?’, and the monk said, ‘to the cow its calf,’ meaning the monastery that owns the original owns the copy.
Alex Reisner, The Atlantic journalist who discovered the data set, is also a computer programmer, and he developed a search tool which enabled authors to easily discover if their work was in the data set. Irish authors like Marian Keyes, Sally Rooney, Anne Enright and Cecelia Ahern are all in there, as well as poets like Vona Groarke.
it is conceivable that AI-generated novels could potentially be incredibly lucrative for publishing groups. Hachette, one of the “big five” publishing conglomerates, provided a statement saying: “Our industry relies on the creative talent of humans and would not exist without it. The value of our partnerships with our creative contributors cannot be overstated.
“The reason I would feel strongly about that aspect of it is that these tech companies are massive, run by right-wing plutocrats – they’ve gutted the independent arts scenes, made it really impossible to be an independent artist, to live as an independent artist in many cities, so there is something just sort of predictably vile about novels being stolen essentially to train a system that we don’t really know yet the extent to which it could wreak havoc on the planet and the world.