AI vs humans: 10,000 writers publish 'empty' book, it is called Don't Steal This Book, but why

AI companies train their models using a huge amount of data derived from books, articles, and other copyrighted content. Authors and writers mostly don't know their work is being used by AI companies and receive no benefit from it. In protest, thousands of authors published an empty book, which is available at the London Book Fair.

Thousands of popular writers in the UK are coming together to voice anger against the AI industry, which is headlined by companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, for allegedly stealing content from their work to train their large language models (LLMs). About 10,000 authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory, and Richard Osman are taking to the streets handing over copies of a new book to attendees of the ongoing London Book Fair. Ironically, the book is empty, well almost, and it is titled “Don't Steal This Book.”

The collective protest comes just days ahead of the UK government’s planned changes to the copyright laws of the country. On March 18, the parliament is scheduled to hear arguments assessing the economic repercussions of some of these changes on stakeholders like for instance, writers in this case. In other words, the government wants to know how AI companies using data from original books, journals and other text with copyright, without proper author consent would impact their creators. Ed Newton-Rex, who is the CEO of the non-profit Fairly Trained and organiser of the book, said on X (previously Twitter), “The UK government is considering upending copyright law to benefit AI companies. Don’t Steal This Book urges them not to.”

Newton-Rex urged London Book Fair attendees to pick up a copy to shows support to the writer movement. There are 1,000 copies for grabs. As to the reason why the book is almost empty, he said that it represents “the effect the government’s plans would have on authors' livelihoods,” due to “the theft of their work by AI companies.” There are no chapters or written content in the book, just the list of authors involved.

The back of the book reads: "The UK government must not legalise book theft to benefit AI companies." It continues with a stark warning: "If they don't, this is what we'll be left with: empty pages, writers without pay, and readers deprived of the next book they'll love.”

AI companies need large amounts of data to train their models, including text, images and other content that are often collected from the open internet. This material can include copyright-protected works such as books, articles, and artwork. Many writers, artists and media companies have argued that their content is being used without permission to train tools like chatbots and image generators. Because of these concerns, the practice has sparked criticism from creative professionals around the world and has also led to several legal battles between creators and AI companies in both Europe and the United States.

For context, last year Anthropic, maker of the viral Claude AI, paid $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by book authors. They stated that the AI startup took pirated copies of their work to train its flagship AI model.