Published On Smashwords? Your Book has Been Stolen…

[AgentPete]

I didn’t realize that the University of Toronto and MIT have been busy stealing books from Smashwords. From Publishers’ Marketplace:

“Compiled in 2014 by researchers at the University of Toronto and MIT, “BookCorpus” should have been called “Stolen from Smashwords”. The researchers apparently scraped posted, self-published ebooks posted by Smashwords that were being offered to read for free—even though doing so violated the terms of service. Adding insult to injury, the original researchers who compiled BookCorpus claimed in their research paper, “These are free books written by yet unpublished authors,” not recognizing that the authors had self-published, and presumably further rationalizing why they gave no thought to intellectual property rights.”

Multiple Large Language Models have been trained on BookCorpus, and there have been subsequent informal variants on BookCorpus that some authors report have included more recently-published books, also scraped from Smashwords.

 

[Pamela Jo]

I didn’t realize that the University of Toronto and MIT have been busy stealing books from Smashwords. From Publishers’ Marketplace:



Multiple Large Language Models have been trained on BookCorpus, and there have been subsequent informal variants on BookCorpus that some authors report have included more recently-published books, also scraped from Smashwords.

I think they meant BookCorpse's. Like the grave robbers and body snatcher of old. I keep thinking of Young Frankensteins "Abby Normal`' brain when I think of these AI "living machines"

A union of all creatives to starve the beast that is AI. That is the only thing that can stand against it. Anyone who even doodles can join for a small fee. Maybe the fee to belong goes up as the creator becomes successful. (Think of 10 percent of Stephen King's haul. Or Banksy's) They have to pay an immense amount of money and electricity to keep AI alive. Writers and artists can still draw and write on almost anything.

 

[Peyton Stafford]

I didn’t realize that the University of Toronto and MIT have been busy stealing books from Smashwords. From Publishers’ Marketplace:



Multiple Large Language Models have been trained on BookCorpus, and there have been subsequent informal variants on BookCorpus that some authors report have included more recently-published books, also scraped from Smashwords.

Prison terms for them all. Prison in Russia.

 

[Jake E]

It such a strange time. Its like that whole court case about that monkey photo some years back.
If you don't recall:

Monkey selfie copyright dispute - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Hannah F]

I don't agree with this public domain business. I'm locking my pictures away!

 

[Robinne Weiss]

Lovely. Sounds like that these particular folks only took free books, though. So if you priced your books, they didn't get lifted. At least not by these guys ... Let's face it, they're not the only ones doing shit like this.

 

[AgentPete]

I'm starting to think that AI is mostly about grift... A fancy way of stealing from creative folk, be they writers, actors, artists, musicians or whatever.

 

[Jake E]

I'm starting to think that AI is mostly about grift... A fancy way of stealing from creative folk, be they writers, actors, artists, musicians or whatever.

Yeah. This is exactly what it is.
Lazy, creatively bankrupt, homunculi looking for easy money.