When The Atlanticpublished a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thiefand The Fishermen and the Dragon –nonfiction tomes that he spent “five to six years researching, writing, and investigating” – had been pirated and fed to a chatbot. He says he felt a “cocktail” of emotions: “anger over the brazenness of the theft, worry over what this means for writers, and a healthy thirst for revenge on these massive corporations that have become galactically wealthy” using his …
