My novel was stolen by a robot – and used to train AI without my consent

And I’m not alone, writes Damian Barr: Stephen King, Zadie Smith and a whole library of writers alive and dead have had their work lifted to feed AI systems like ChatGPT. But we’re not going down without a fight – and here’s why

I did not give consent – had somebody bothered to ask me or my agent I would have refused (Getty/iStock)

I’ve been robbed. Along with Zadie Smith, Stephen King, Maggie O’Farrell and thousands of other writers. We don’t know exactly when, and we couldn’t describe the thief. But sometime in the last year our books were snatched from the shelf by someone in Silicon Valley and forced into a gigantic algorithm, which is now being used to generate unauthorised content and unlimited profits for AI systems including ChatGPT.

The thief, or thieves, almost got away with it. But they left traces – ghosts in the machine, caught by hard-working humans. A piece in the Atlantic – now read furiously by almost every writer on the planet – revealed more than 191,000 books are being used without permission to develop AI systems by Meta, OpenAI and other companies. A whole stolen library. And these are just the ones we know about so far.

I did not give consent. I have been given no credit and offered no compensation. I still can’t quite believe this is happening. I first saw the story tweeted by Sathnam Sanghera who wrote: “So my books are also being used to train AI without my permission … Millions of hours of authors’ work being exploited by big tech with zero payment. Funny how writers keep getting shafted. RAGE”.