So Meta Stole Our Stories

On a typical tropical day in Guam beneath a shelter

I woke up this morning and saw my Facebook feed full of outrage about how The Atlantic created a new searchable database that allows authors to see if their books were used by Meta to train their AI. Here's how it worked. 

Authors and publishers uploaded their e-books to places like Amazon. Piracy sites (sometimes called mirror sites) stole these books and articles by either scanning the books and creating PDF versions or by stripping their codes and "recreating" the books which they could then sell to customers who were attracted by the low-cost or free books.

Meta, apparently, used these pirated versions of a magnitude of books and articles to train their AI. 7.5 MILLION books! 

Piracy of this sort is not new. Some of these book outfits (often overseas) are huge. When one gets taken down, another springs up to take its place. It's a massive problem. 

Or is it?

In a way, yes. Of course it is illegal as all get out, and authors feel cheated because someone stole their work, is selling it for cheap, and keeping the profit for themselves. That sucks. On the other hand--and please don't hate me for saying this--the people who are using pirate sites to get cheaper books were probably NOT going to purchase our books for the full price on Amazon or anywhere else. 

In other words, the piracy sites aren't stealing money that would have definitely gone into our pockets. but they ARE making money with our content, content they haven't spent countless hours creating, crafting, honing, sweating over. And that makes me mad. It's cheating. Kind of like big corporations cheat on their taxes while the rest of us have to pay ours. Both big corps and piracy sites are gaming the system and profiting while the rest of us stand helplessly by, do our work, accept with gratitude when we are paid, and pay what's demanded of us. 

The Author's Guild wrote an article about this and shared the searchable database link. You can find it at this LINK. 

Of course I jumped on to search my name, and sure enough, my second Olivia Lively title was listed. Honestly? I would have been more upset if I hadn't been included! 

However, piracy in low-wage countries preying on us is one thing. Having one of our own companies, in this case Meta, steal from us is a major betrayal! Our American economic and judicial and infrastructure system has allowed Meta to become the multi-billion dollar company it is. And this is how it repays our creatives? Our writers? With a total lack of respect for the people who,along with other artists, create the cultural wealth of our society. 

All this pounds into my brain, once again, that the time for ditching social media was yesterday. It's time for us to stop relying on Meta and other platforms for free promotion in exchange for our attention and our souls. I'm trying to figure out how to do this. I've been spending less time on Facebook, but I'm reluctant to give up my account because in some ways the author page, at least, works as kind of a Yellow Pages entry. 

On the other hand, how can we justify our continued support  of a broligarch who, according to a new book that just came out from whistleblower Sarah Whynn-Williams--Careless People: A cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism--actually agreed/offered to collude with the Chinese Communist Government to spy on and report on people? Not to mention disinformation campaigns. And some sexual harassment stuff if what I heard on a podcast is to be believed. 

Of course, Meta went to court to try to block the author from promoting her book, which of course led to... SO MANY MORE SALES. Haha. Here is a link to an article. LINK

So that's two strikes against Meta in one week. Is it time to ditch it once and for all? 

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Shelley's most recent Pink Dandelions newsletter went out today. In it find an essay on designating and designing your own Creative Sanctuaries--both physical and mental/psychological--in these weird, chaotic, and noisy times. See The Creative Sanctuary. 

 

 

Book Mania

 By Charlotte Hinger

Every Christmas our family goes all out to support the publishing industry. We buy books like crazy. 

A friend asked me recently if I read fiction when I'm writing and if that interferes with my own work. No, reading while writing doesn't affect the work in progress, and giving up reading when I'm writing just makes me cranky. When I read a book with great description or characterization I try to improve whatever is on my computer at the time. I also find myself giving more thought to details in my own work.

I own way too many books. I simply can't help myself. They are as addictive as a drug. 

Most novelists have a horror of "unconscious plagiarism." So I was infuriated by a friend's recent blog on the outrageous blatant plagiarism perpetrated by a woman who copied a novel nearly verbatim and then posted it on Amazon as though it were her own book. She made quite a bit of money by doing this.

I feel so strongly about the issue of creative piracy that I won't even read books that expand on a dead author's characters or plot lines. I'm too cowardly to list all the books I refuse to read because I don't want to respond to readers who see nothing wrong with it.

To me, poaching characters is dishonorable! What's more, a line from an old Kipling poem, The Mary Gloster, comes to mind: "They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind, And I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

Now we have AI to deal with. But I've noticed books built on another author's work flounder in the marketplace because the original creative spark isn't there.

Creative energy is unique to an individual. The source can't be duplicated. There is a great deal of craftsmanship involved with creating good books and much to be learned by studying the techniques of the masters. Especially when one begins to write. 

I often turn to books that I especially liked to see how they did something. I went back to Love Let Me Not Hunger to see why I thought Mr. Albert's leaving the circus was one of the saddest events I had ever come across.

How do other writer get characters out of room and change scenes? Oh. They don't. They simply double space. Why do the pages in this book rush by? Oh. Short, short sentences. Short chapters. Mostly action. Why do I like longer books with more detail? Oh. It's characterization.

Most of us go to the masters for instruction and inspiration, but a pox on anyone who goes with the intention of copying material.

 

Scribes to our Robot Overlords

 The previous Type M post from John Corrigan touched upon writing samples from the Artificial Intelligence app, ChaptGPT and its worrisome implications, especially to us writers. I've also seen other examples of what AI can produce as it scrubs the Internet for content in remarkable ways. What really impressed me were its Mid-Century and Art Deco period recreations of Burning Man. However, all was not perfect as like many other amateur artists, AI had difficulty rendering hands. Plus the occasional person was given three legs. Or it could be, AI has already decided that people do need these extra appendages and when it controls the human birthing process in artificial wombs (coming soon to a clinic near you), our children will be the deformed pets of our robot overlords. 

But there are groups who cheer AI's ability to generate content almost instantly. At the 20Books Vegas writing conference, the attitude was that since many of its authors write to market and depend on a prolific output to meet audience demands, the ability for AI to "write" sequels can be leveraged into more books to sell, i.e., more profit. Another group that welcomes AI are Instagram/TikTok influencers, such as models, who also need to produce a continuous stream of content to satisfy their audience and keep the algorithms happy. Many argue that since much of their content is the same--posing in bikinis, etc., why not use AI to make more pictures? 

The ability of AI to mimic reality is both its greatest strength and greatest danger. We're close to seeing credible imitations of people--"deep fakes"--in outlandish video simulations. One app claims it can sample a brief recording of your voice and from that, produce an audio of you saying anything. Couple that with similar video software and your identity as an individual can be at risk. Looking deeper into this dark mirror and acknowledging that the demographic most harmed by social media are adolescent girls, can you imagine the humiliation when an unassuming young woman sees that her image was uploaded into a AI porn app? Whoops, it's already happened.

 

 

The Robots Have Won

Pardon my erratic posting. You'd think with the pandemic lockdown I would've settled into a definite routine but things can get very uncertain with interruptions coming at the last moment. 

The title for this post was inspired by a comment made by Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, and I'll get to that in a bit. Not too long ago, a couple of years maybe but seems like eons in our current conceptual thinking, the big scare was the Robot-apocalypse. Machines would take over and start to push us humans around. Eventually we'd end up in a Terminator world or The Matrix. Now a biological virus has temporarily shelved those fears. 

Back to Scott Adams. He claimed that AI--Artificial Intelligence--is now in charge of human decisions, in other words, the machines have won. His reasoning is that much of what goes online is decided by algorithms administered by AI that can reach across platforms. These algorithms exist for one reason, to maximize profit for the owners of the AI. How this happens is that the AI culls through reactions to what's posted on media--click bait is the most common example. The AI compares what generated the most clicks and delivers reports accordingly to the programmers. AI can now write new algorithms for itself (no need for meat-bag programmers), the measure being what generates the most traffic, not just on social media posts but across the spectrum of electronic content from phones, smart speakers, license plate readers, cash registers, you name it. Powerful computers with enormous banks of memory have you under the microscope. Keep in mind that everything about you is being cataloged--what you wrote, where you go, when were you there, what did you look at, what did you listen to, what did you buy, who was with you? Health monitors and smart watches add your physical vitals. It's possible for AI to track your physiological response to what you look at on Facebook. If you had an intense emotional reaction to a news article, for example, AI knows that, and more importantly, what did you do afterwards? Who did you contact? What did you share? AI has amassed about each of us an extensive glossary of personal trigger words and incorporates them to nudge us toward a desired response. Positive scenario: if we're shopping for a winter coat, the machine knows what styles and colors we prefer and displays the appropriate selections. Negative scenario: if AI, rather its big tech owner, wants us to vote a certain way, then dark trigger words can be used to steer us from the "wrong" decision. 

We've already known people who've been in Facebook jail or demonetized on YouTube because an algorithm decided what they posted was against "community standards." What AI did was read or listen to the content and decide based on certain words that it was inappropriate, regardless of the context. Twitter banned links to the Babylon Bee because the AI didn't understand satire. Sadly, rather than admit the shortcomings of the algorithms, big tech prefers to side with them because in the long term, the gains in massive data harvesting outweigh the occasional stumble.

We've created a symbiotic relationship with AI, which has morphed into a ruthlessly effective parasite because it gives us what we want. We in turn, let it grow and expand and take more and more control. We could unplug from AI but we've become emotionally dependent on its power to provide instant gratification. And every solution we have to the perils of this dependency seem to involve yet a deeper co-dependence. Spending too much time online? Then try this app that monitors your usage and decides when you've had enough.

All this time George Orwell thought we'd have Big Brother forced upon us when instead we willingly climbed into his lap. Little did we suspect that Big Brother would be a robot.