My Books Were Used to Train Meta's Generative AI. Good.

When The Atlantic revealed last month that tens of thousands of books published in the past 20 years had been used without permission to train Meta's AI language model, well-known authors were outraged, calling it a "smoking gun" for mega-corporate misbehavior. Now that the magazine has put out a searchable database of affected books, the outrage is redoubled: "I would never have consented for Meta to train AI on any of my books, let alone five of them," wrote the novelist Lauren Groff. The original Atlantic story gestured at this sense of violation and affront: "The future promised by AI is written with stolen words," it said. Still I was mystified, at first, by the Sturm und Drang response, and by the claim that generative AI is "powered by mass theft." Perhaps I was just jealous of the famous writers who were being singled out as victims--Stephen King, Zadie Smith, Michael Pollan, and others who command huge speaking fees and lucrative secondary-rights deals.