Please Boost This - Blog Posts
PSA: "Shaxpir" AI writing software: AVOID!
The tl;dr: A guy is selling subscriptions to a software tool to "help you write better novels." And to train it, he's used tens of thousands of novels from authors you know, without those authors giving him permission.
...Sometimes things seem to blow up with unusual speed. This particular shit seems to have hit the fan yesterday, primarily on Twitter, when various authors discovered the guy's website, prosecraft.io, which featured "clippings" of the authors he'd stolen from... and the revelation that he had scraped their entire books, not just excerpts, to train his AI. ("2,470,720,986 words," his website bragged, "from 27,668 books, by 15,622 authors." The only authors who were off limits, apparently, were people using [or paying for] his software.) Though the website is offline now, if you take a look at this Google search, you can see the covers of just some of the books the entire contents of which he exploited for AI training.
This usage goes well beyond the "fair use" defense that he belatedly (and ineffectively) attempted to employ. It's straightforward copyright infringement, on a massive scale: good old fashioned theft.
The guy took the website down within hours of this news starting to blow up all over Twitter... which is no surprise. But this ain't over yet.
Gizmodo has a goodish breakdown of the broad situation here.
If you search here on the #prosecraft tag, you'll find local reaction, and numerous furious (and sometimes quite funny) responses imported from Twitter. Plainly, at the legal end of things, this guy is about to get nuked from orbit. (Among the authors he made the gross tactical error of stealing from: Stephen King, James Patterson, the Pratchett Estate, and Nora Roberts. This... is not going to go well for him.)
Leverage's John Rogers sums it up succinctly:
Meanwhile: the guy who created this whole mess is still selling subscriptions to his Shaxpir software (I'm not adding the URL here) that he trained using stolen goods. So (until someone stops him) you might like to reblog this info for the attention of others here who prefer their writing to stay human-made as well as -fueled, and not to support the seriously ethically-challenged.
And on a side issue: I'm idly wondering how long it'll take somebody to DMCA his still-live site's webhost or his domain registrar with an eye to taking down that down too. Granted, it'd be a temporary solution at best until the big hitters' lawyers can get more permanent solutions in gear. But enjoyable...