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Tobias Carroll's avatar

I get where you're coming from here.....but for me, as someone who has a couple of books in the database that Meta's been using to train its AI, the current situation feels like the worst of both worlds. I don't love seeing a pirated version of one of my books showing up on a sketchy-looking ebook site (which has happened), but at least that means that someone's.....reading them. Maybe. I don't love the normalizing of not paying for art - I have too many musician friends for that - but I get it, up to a point.

Whereas in the case of Meta, there's literally a large corporation saying that it needs access to everything everyone has written so that it can train a product it's put absurd amounts of money into, but also that the value of that writing is zip, zilch, nada....

I don't like it, is what I'm saying.

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Richard Donnelly's avatar

Thanks Anne. What a circus the industry was. And still is, in a different way : ) In copyright, the thing to remember is this: Only your exact words in the exact order are absolutely protected. The rest is a gray area. Plots may well be vulnerable, so watch it, writers. If I may link my own post, I wrote about this kind of theft here https://richarddonnelly.substack.com/p/authors-own-it Thanks again Anne for your fine overview.

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