Washington Post – William D. Cohan is a best-selling author and a founding partner of Puck News: “The other day someone sent me the searchable database published by The Atlantic that have been used to train the generative AI systems being developed by Meta, Bloomberg and others. It turns out that four of my seven books are in the data set, called Books3. Whoa. Not only did I not give permission for my books to be used to generate AI products, but I also wasn’t even consulted about it. I had no idea this was happening. Neither did my publishers, Penguin Random House (for three of the books) and Macmillan (for the other one). Neither my publishers nor I were compensated for use of my intellectual property. Books3 just scraped the content away for free, with Meta et al. profiting merrily along the way. And Books3 is just one of many pirated collections being used for this purpose. My experience is hardly unique. According to the database the Atlantic has made available, four of Michael Beschloss’s books have been crawled, and 10 or so of Michael Lewis’s books have been ingested into the AI ecosystem. “I would never have consented for Meta to train AI on any of my books, let alone five of them,” novelist Lauren Groff tweeted recently. “Hyperventilating.” There are thousands of other examples…”