A group of 10,000 writers joined a protest book titled “Don’t Steal this Book,” to protest AI.
It was distributed at the London Book Fair last week. Will it become a bestseller?
The controversy stems from revelations from the copyright lawsuits in the United States that most, if not all, of the early LLMs developed by AI companies involved in the litigation were trained on books without permission of their authors. Plus, at least some of them acquired copies of the books from so-called shadow libraries online that book authors and publishers have tried to shut down.
Thus far, two federal judges in the United States ruled that the training was a transformative fair use, but the judges disagreed over whether the initial acquisition of such books from shadow libraries online was a part of, or separate from, that fair use in AI training.
Here’s a brief summary of where things stand under the rulings in the United States: