S7 Ep. 1: The AI Pirates: The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner on Books3, Copyright, and How Big Tech is Stealing Our Books

Writer, programmer, and tech consultant Alex Reisner joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his recent Atlantic articles on Books3, a massive data set that includes hundreds of thousands of pirated e-books, and that Meta and other companies have used to train generative AI. Reisner explains how he extracted book names and titles from long strings of text in Books3 to create a searchable database, and why not finding yourself in the database doesn’t mean your work is safe. He also reflects on the dangers of metaphorical language in discussing AI, what he’s heard from legal experts, what publishers are and aren’t doing, and how piracy has shifted from benefiting individuals to helping corporations profit. Reisner reads from his groundbreaking Atlantic coverage.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Alex Reisner in The Atlantic

• “These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech”
• “What I Found in a Database Meta Uses to Train Generative AI”
• “Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI”

Others:

• Open Letter to Generative AI Leaders (The Authors Guild)
• Practical Tips for Authors to Protect Their Works from AI Use (The Authors Guild)
• “Some writers are furious that AI consumed their books. Others? Less so,” by Sophia Nguyen, The Washington Post 
• Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 6, Episode 17: “Chatbot vs. Writer: Vauhini Vara on the Perils and Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence”
• “My Books Were Used to Train AI,” by Stephen King, The Atlantic
• “Murdered by My Replica?” by Margaret Atwood, The Atlantic
• “My Books Were Used to Train Meta’s Generative AI. Good.” by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic
• Alice Munro
• Rebecca Solnit
• Meghan O’Rourke
• George Saunders 
• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Martin Amis
• “Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement,” by Wes Davis, The Verge

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