“I get hung up on the word scraping,” author R.O. Kwon says. “It sounds quite violent.” Last September, when Kwon learned that her first novel, The Incendiaries, was part of the Books3 dataset that some generative AI models were trained on at the time, she felt violated. She and other authors took to social media, lobbing anger, hurt, and frustration at the tech companies that had secretly “scraped” the Internet for data without consent from or compensation for creators. Kwon’s novels and others were poured into machine learning models, teaching them how to make “new” content based on patterns in the ingested text. (It’s this “generating” that makes generative AI distinct from other types of models that may only identify patterns or make calculations.) The years of work on those books added up: 10 years for one novel, 20 for a memoir, multiplied by the nearly 200,000 books found in the dataset.
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