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On Monday morning, numerous writers woke up to learn that their books had been uploaded and scanned into a massive dataset without their consent. A project of cloud word processor Shaxpir, Prosecraft<\/a> compiled over 27,000 books, comparing, ranking and analyzing them based on the \u201cvividness\u201d of their language. Many authors \u2014 including Young Adult powerhouse Maureen Johnson<\/a> and \u201cLittle Fires Everywhere\u201d author Celeste Ng<\/a> \u2014 spoke out against Prosecraft for training a model on their books without consent. Even books published less than a month ago had already been uploaded.<\/p>\n After a day full of righteous online backlash, Prosecraft creator Benji Smith took down the website, which had existed since 2017.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve spent thousands of hours working on this project, cleaning up and annotating text, organizing and tweaking things,\u201d Smith wrote<\/a>. \u201cBut in the meantime, \u2018AI\u2019 became a thing. And the arrival of AI on the scene has been tainted by early use-cases that allow anyone to create zero-effort impersonations of artists, cutting those creators out of their own creative process.\u201d<\/p>\n Smith\u2019s Prosecraft was not a generative AI tool, but authors worried it could become one, since he had amassed a dataset of a quarter billion words from published books, which he found by crawling the internet.<\/p>\n Prosecraft would show two paragraphs from a book, one that was \u201cmost passive\u201d and one that was \u201cmost vivid.\u201d It then placed the books into percentile rankings based on how vivid, how long or how passive it was.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re a writer as a career it\u2019s maddening, because in part because style is not the same as writing a fucking whitepaper for a business that needs to be in\u00a0active voice<\/em> or whatever,\u201d Masad said. \u201cStyle is style!\u201d<\/p>\n Smith did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but he elaborated on his intentions in his blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSince I was only publishing summary statistics, and small snippets from the text of those books, I believed I was honoring the spirit of the Fair Use doctrine, which doesn\u2019t require the consent of the original author,\u201d Smith wrote. Some authors noted that the excerpts of their books on Prosecraft included major spoilers, causing further frustration.<\/p>\n Though Smith apologized, authors remain exasperated. For artists and writers, the recent proliferation of AI tools has created a deeply frustrating game of whac-a-mole. As soon as they opt out of one database, they find that their work has been used to train another AI model, and so on.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty much the norm, from what I can tell, for these sites and projects to do whatever they\u2019re doing first and then hope that no one notices and then disappear or get defensive when they inevitably do,\u201d Masad said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Generative AI and the technology behind self-publishing have created a perfect storm for scammy activities. Amazon has been flooded with low-quality, AI-generated travel guides<\/a>, and even AI-generated children\u2019s books<\/a>. But tools like ChatGPT are basically trained on the sum total of the internet, so this means that real travel writers or children\u2019s books authors could be getting inadvertently plagiarized.<\/p>\n