AI stole my work, the wholesale theft of intellectual property is dark and sinister - Andrew Vine

Now if I ask the most widely-used AI model, Chat GPT, about the subjects of the books, I enter a chilling and distorted world of fakery.

Before my eyes, slightly-altered versions of nearly a quarter of a million of my own words, over which I fretted and sweated across two years of research and then months of long, late nights writing, spool out and fill the screen line by line.

Very unsettling indeed. And infuriating, because there is no redress I can pursue for my work being blatantly ripped off and no chance of me being paid.

The ultimate culprit for my books being stolen is Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the superficially friendly faces of social media, used by billions of people around the world.

But there’s nothing friendly about what it has done. On the contrary, this wholesale theft of intellectual property is dark and sinister.

The actual thieving has been done by something called LibGen, an online database that is as mysterious as it is impenetrable. To describe it as shadowy would be to understate how insidious it is.

Ask Google or Bing to find it and a link comes up. Click again and again, but it won’t open.

Despite the best efforts of authors’ organisations both in the UK and the USA, nobody has been able to pin down how LibGen has obtained the full texts of millions of books, or who is behind it.

But a US publication, The Atlantic, has established that Meta used its data to train AI, and managed to crack open LibGen sufficiently to search its database. Wriggling through this crack, I found my books. I haven’t a clue how they got there, and nor has my publisher, Britain’s biggest non-fiction house.

Last week, authors protested outside Meta’s London headquarters, as they have previously in the US. Along with more than 11,000 others, I’ve signed an online petition calling on Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to hold Meta to account for the unlicensed use of copyrighted work.

I’m not holding my breath on that happening. Nor do I expect a response to my email of complaint to Meta.

A mega-wealthy company not troubled by international condemnation of its sites hosting material that has driven children to suicide and self-harm isn’t going to take any notice of a snotty note from me.

I’ve no idea whether being ripped off is going to hurt me financially. The two books in question, Last of the Summer Wine – The Story of the World’s Longest Running Comedy Series and A Very Strange Way to Go to War, which tells the story of a cruise liner’s role in the Falklands War, continue to sell steadily many years after their publications in 2010 and 2012, and contribute a modest amount to my annual income.

But if Chat GPT can more or less regurgitate them for nothing, why would anybody bother buying a copy?

The government needs to wake up to this brazen theft of people’s work, which risks destroying Britain’s creative industries.

It’s not just books, but the whole range of media, arts and music at risk. Eminent figures including Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Elton John have urged action to stop AI destroying livelihoods.

The unholy alliance between Donald Trump and tech titans such as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Elon Musk, can only accelerate that destruction.

Trump’s tariffs and trade wars will pressure countries into giving these giants an easy ride in terms of regulation and taxation in the hope that currying favour with the president’s allies wins them better deals with the US.

Doing so ignores the total absence of morality of these companies, and this ought to make us deeply uneasy.

The scale of the theft of millions of books is mind-boggling. There has been nothing like it in history, yet the company responsible has not batted an eyelid, apologised, or given an undertaking that it will not make a similar target of any other creative endeavour.

It is almost as if the likes of Meta stand beyond the reach of any legal sanction, acting with the same impunity as a dictator with his boot on the neck of his country.

Except that the tech titans have their boots on the neck of the entire world, with no government quite sure how to challenge them and most fearful of trying.