The billionaires, the pirates, and the great book heist

Sounds like a great title for a book or a film, doesn't it? Sadly, it's a reflection of something terrible that's going on in the publishing world right now and, as such, there are no pictures in this blog post because the subject matter doesn't deserve them.

If you follow any authors on the socials, particularly Facebook, you will likely have seen a flood of upset and anger yesterday and today at the latest revelation relating to the horror of AI being trained to write books so I thought I'd write a blog post about one of the extremely dark and upsetting aspects of being an author – the blatant ongoing theft of our work. 

For as long as I've been a published author, there has been an ongoing battle with pirate sites in the publishing industry. I don't know how major an issue this was before the advent of the eBook as I wasn't an author then but eBooks have been around since before I was published and, even though the providers of the digital formats of books are meant to have systems in place to avoid pirate sites acquiring them, these either aren't effective or the software the pirate sites have is more effective.

Authors and publishers frequently contact these pirate sites to demand that their books are taken down but these requests are typically ignored or they remove them … and add them back in soon after. 

There have been cases where entire sites have been shut down thanks to some larger-scale intervention, but this is like a game of 'whack-a-mole' where one site shuts down only for another one (or two) to open in its place.

There are some pirate sites which offer free books and don't actually provide them – instead getting information from those who sign up and potentially sending a nasty virus back to their computers. Good. They deserve it. I’m not going to apologise if that sounds harsh because those individuals have logged onto those sites with the express purpose of acquiring stolen books.

But most of these sites do have books available. Stolen books. I'm not going to sugar coat this. No matter how these readers justify it to themselves – money's tight, they read lots of books and can't afford to pay for them all, everyone else is doing it – anyone who has ever downloaded a pdf (or whatever format it's in) from a pirate site is a thief. I’ll say that again in capitals to emphasise my point: ANYONE WHO HAS EVER DOWNLOADED A BOOK FROM A PIRATE SITE IS A THIEF. They are handling stolen property. They are breaking the law. 

And those three excuses I listed – along with a host of others – are not justification for doing it. I understand that money is tight for so many people at the moment but that means difficult decisions have to be made about what a person consumes. I’ve personally had times in my life where I've been completely broke and severely in debt and I’ve had to survive on hardly anything. I didn’t steal the things I couldn’t afford – I just did without and hoped things would improve one day.

If a person reads a lot and claims they can't afford to pay for all the books they consume, how on earth is stealing them the solution? Especially when there are libraries where they can borrow the books they want to read for free.

As for everyone doing it, if everyone was jumping into a volcano, would you follow them? That is NEVER an excuse. Be the person who says No, it’s wrong, I’m not going to do this.

I don’t know what it is about the creative industry but there seems to be this expectation from many that creatives should give their work away for free. That somebody isn’t a true creative if they want/need/expect to be paid for what they create and that they just do it for the love of the craft. Seriously? Excuse my language but what absolute bollocks. Would a plumber unblock your drain just for the satisfaction of solving a problem? Would a teacher teach your children purely for the joy of educating? Would a firefighter run into a burning building only for the sense of satisfaction of rescuing someone? I could go on and on with this but I’m sure you get the picture.

The rise of social media and influencers approaching creatives to give them freebies ‘for the exposure’ hasn’t helped this expectation that music, art, crafts, books etc. should be out there for all to enjoy without payment. If you do anything creative, of course you do it because you love it … but loving something doesn’t mean you don’t have a mortgage or rent and bills to pay. I worked in HR in my previous life and I loved many of the roles I had but there was never any question mark over whether I’d be paid every month for the work I’d done. So why should creatives not receive payment for their work?

So we’re already battling with the whole piracy thing and it’s upsetting and demoralising and then we’re hit with the biggest threat to the creative industry there’s ever been: AI.

Before I go further, let me be clear that I am not against advances in technology. There are many amazing ways in which AI can be and is being used, particularly in the healthcare industry helping with earlier detection of cancer, for example. This is incredible. This is taking something that a human cannot do to the next level. I repeat, TAKING SOMETHING A HUMAN CANNOT DO. CAN NOT DO.

But humans can write books. Humans do write books. A human writing a book is what makes the reader fall in love with a story – the voice of the author, the nuance they bring to characters based on personal experiences/observation/imagination. When a reader says they can’t put a book down, it’s because the author who has told that story has done so in a way that speaks to that reader, engages with them, makes them feel part of that world. A computer can’t do that. A computer can write a story that has a strong plot and all the storytelling elements, but they can’t bring in that human connection. 

Until now.

Somebody somewhere decided they wanted computers to tell stories and that AI was the way to do this. They recognised the limitations and realised that they only way to get AI to create books as good as those written by humans was to teach them how to do it. And what better way of teaching them than to feed them all the books which had already been written. By humans. Millions of books. And the more books AI consumed, the more it learned about voice and nuance, the better it got, the more it emulated the human input that makes a book special.

So AI started writing books and those books have been unleashed into the world and the publishing world is now burning – a fire which is gaining power every day.

Do you know how long it takes to write a novel? A long time! If it was a case of sitting at your computer and being able to immediately bang out 100,000 perfect words (I use that figure as most of mine are about that long), it would probably take a couple of weeks. But that’s not how writing works. Most writers go through several drafts and might even scrap significant chunks of their work to get the story and characters right. Once my manuscript is submitted, I have one or two rounds of structural edits, a round of copy edits and a final proofread. And that’s without adding in all the time needed for the brewing of ideas, plot wrangling, research, conversations with writing friends helping unknot tricky aspects and a whole host of other things that go into the process of idea to finished product. We’re talking many months and, in some cases, years.

How long does it take AI to write a book? Hours? Days? I don’t know because I’ve never tried but asking Google How long does it take AI to write a book? brings up a scary number of search results including a stack of links on how to do it. Yes, there is guidance out there on how to do it. In fact, my Facebook feed often throws up sickening adverts of some woman wandering round a pool boasting about how she has made a six-figure salary by writing books … without writing a word herself. Eek!

Amazon – the biggest distributor of books in the world – restricts authors to uploading three eBooks a day. THREE A DAY? WTF?! Who has three books a day written and ready to upload? The thieves using AI, of course. And they’re not going to restrict themselves to just three. They’re going to have multiple accounts so they can upload 30, 300, 3,000… a day. They apparently have to check a box to say that the book has been generated using AI. A box. Seriously? Will these people tick the box? I don’t know and, even if they do, I don’t imagine the book appears for sale with Written by AI, DO NOT BUY! warnings emblazoned all over it.

Many voracious readers join subscription services such as Kindle Unlimited. For most indie authors, this is a much greater income generator for them than sale of eBooks as they are paid for each page read (certainly the case for me when I was indie). This payment per page read is a fraction of a penny but it does add up. The bestselling individual books and bestselling authors can potentially earn bonuses too. Publishers may have a similar set-up with their authors being paid for pages read or they might have a set royalty being paid providing a certain percentage of the book is read by the borrower. My publisher has the latter system. The pages read payment and the bonuses have been reducing over time because of the flood of AI books into the market spreading the KU funding pot too thinly. So many indie authors have reported massive hits in their income to the point where many may need to stop writing altogether because they can’t afford to keep doing it. Many traditionally published authors are feeling this hit too as being trad published is no guarantee of success and the royalties are lower with the publisher taking a cut (and the agent if the author has one).

Just pausing to take a deep shaky breath…

So, back to yesterday’s and today's posts being shared all over Facebook. It has been known for some time that companies have been stealing our books – our copyrighted books – to train AI and there has been a huge furore about this. I, like many authors, have written to my MP (who didn’t respond) and have filled in a protest survey on the government’s website. (There's a proper name for this. I’m that angry, I’ve blanked on it! EDIT: Petition!!!) The Society of Authors have been surveying authors and trying to find a way forward and there have been various other activities going on, but nothing has been resolved. The government aren't paying any attention.

Then yesterday it emerged that Meta – the company which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and more – (allegedly???) took things a step further when it came to training their AI model. They worked with the biggest pirate site to get access to all the books on their database. Yes, you read that right. The billionaires behind Facebook actively illegally engaged with thieves to gain illegal access to 7.5million pirated books in order to illegally train their AI model. Yes, I used the word illegal a lot in that sentence because that’s what this is. ILLEGAL. (Credit to journalist Alex Reisner whose article in The Atlantic drew this to the attention of so many yesterday).

I can’t even…

I couldn’t sleep last night. I can’t write today. It was already bleak and this latest revelation is beyond devastating.

Like so many authors, I’m terrified of what this means for the future of books. Not only are our books being stolen by pirate sites but now our stolen work is being used to train computers that could replace us. And the big question for me is why? Why does a computer need to write a book when this is not something humans can’t do? Well, I know the answer to that – to make some very rich people even richer.

That’s it. That’s the sorry state of things at the moment.

Most of the comments I saw on Facebook yesterday and today from authors were shock and expressions of being in the same boat as there was a database we could access showing how many of our books had been stolen. It was 25 for me including some of my indie releases (no longer available) and two Dutch translations so not quite all my work but a very large proportion of it. For others, it was every version of everything they've ever written. But it doesn't matter if it's one book or 500, it's still hurtful. Comments from readers also expressed shock and disgust. I personally didn’t share the post which was doing the rounds as I wanted to have overnight to think about it and take the immediate emotion out of it. Not that that has stopped me being emotional about it. It’s horrendous.

It was touching to see the support of readers, incensed on the behalf of their favourite authors and the industry in general. However, whenever I see more general articles about injustices authors face, I’m shocked at how much abuse is often directed at authors in the comments. Serves them right. They should give their work away for free. All authors are rich anyway – they can afford it. Authors are always whinging. And so it goes on. I don’t understand it. Especially the assumption that authors are rich. Yes, some are millionaires but the average annual income for authors is £7,000pa. It used to be £10,000 and it dropped a couple of years ago. And that’s average so, while there are lots earning more, there will also be lots earning way less. And even if an author is a millionaire, that doesn't give anyone the right to steal their work. It just doesn't.

The way to be financially successful as an author is to sell a very large number of books and to do this consistently and the reason that the volume is needed is because authors make so little money on the sale of individual books. If you were to pick up a paperback with a RRP of £9.99 or £10.99, the author is likely making 40p-50p on it. An eBook at 99p will earn the author a few pence. An eBook at £2.99 will be similar to the paperback royalties. A book in The Works will earn about 6–7p. Could you imagine working for months and being paid less than 50p for it? This is why we need to sell in volume and this is why it hurts so much when readers begrudge paying more than 99p for an eBook or only ‘buy’ a book when it’s on a free offer. Or, worse, just steal all the books from a pirate site. So much potential income is already lost by books being loaned to friends, sold on pre-loved sites or to second-hand shops, and donated to charity shops. Add in the income lost from pirate sites and now AI taking over – its ability to tell stories coming from our own stolen work – and it’s so completely soul-destroying.

What’s next? The Author’s Guild (USA-based) have a letter that can be sent from authors to Meta’s CEO. If you’re an author, here’s the link.

The Australian Society of Authors have provided a Google Form for objections.

At the time of writing, I can’t see anything equivalent from the UK’s Society of Authors but I’m sure something will be forthcoming. UPDATE: This evening, SOA issued this statement online.

To all those who properly demonstrate their love of books and their support for the authors who create them by buying their books or borrowing them through payment into a legitimate subscription service, you have my immense gratitude. 

For those who do not financially support authors in any way – by using pirate sites, using a subscription service but always renewing it for free or at a heavily discounted rate, by obtaining books from an early review site when they aren’t actually bloggers/reviewers with a following to whom they promote the books and so on, this is a plea to stop and think about the impact. Please consider how you would feel if you did your job each day/week/month but your employer didn’t pay you. Or, if you’re not working, if someone came into your house and helped themselves to your belongings simply because they wanted them. 

If you love reading, then please do whatever you can to support real authors before none of us can afford to do this anymore and everything you read is written by a computer, trained to write by stealing our work. This affects all authors – indie, traditionally-published and hybrid. It affects those who sell millions of books, are at the top of the charts and bestseller lists and those who sell just a handful of copies, all genres, new to the career or established. And it affects everyone involved in the process – cover designers, editors, proofreaders, marketing experts, voice actors narrating audiobooks and basically anyone who works with authors, whether that's on a freelance basis or employed by a publishing house. This affects an entire industry and, as I said earlier, that industry is on fire. Whatever you can do to extinguish those flames, please, please, please do it. Because if the public don't react and are happy to read books written by AI and listen to audiobooks narrated by AI (typically using stolen samples from real voice actors), then so many careers will be over. Absolutely heartbreaking.

I've been made redundant eight times in my HR career. Every time has been hard but things change, companies restructure, contracts are lost, companies cease trading. But this is a change which is not needed. Not at all. I don't want to be made redundant from the job I love which I know brings joy to so many and neither do any of my fellow creatives.

Big heavy-hearted hugs

Jessica xx