Montreal writers want more protections as AI sucks up their stories

Detective Émile Cinq-Mars races to crack the case before the next car bomb erupts on the streets of Montreal.

Trevor Ferguson, who writes crime fiction under the name "John Farrow," has penned hundreds of pages in which his detective muse locks up the city's criminals. 

But weeks ago, Ferguson says he was shocked to discover seven of his novels were among the 183,000 books used for artificial intelligence training, as reported by The Atlantic. AI companies used his words, characters and plots without compensating him or asking for his consent. 

Using the data from his stories, the AI can generate writing that mimics his storytelling. Now, he fears detective Cinq-Mars may be solving mysteries in sequels written by machine. 

"This is but another dagger in the heart of writers worldwide," said Ferguson. "Essentially they're using our work as the engines for our own destruction."

Along with other writers from Montreal, Ferguson is calling for measures to protect the livelihoods of authors threatened by companies trying to turn a profit at their expense. 

In September, the Authors Guild in the United States launched a class-action lawsuit — on behalf of fiction authors like George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen — against OpenAI for copyright infringement, calling it a "systemic theft on a mass scale." 

These claims have not yet been tested in court.

Lending its support for the Authors Guild, the Writers' Union of Canada put out a statement saying it suspects the works were ingested from pirated ebooks and may launch its own class-action lawsuit in the coming weeks. The Quebec Writers' Federation (QWF) told CBC News it would consider supporting it. 

Authors of what is often labelled "genre" writing — including mystery, fantasy, horror and science fiction — will be first in line to be replaced, Ferguson says.

"They can just be utterly replaced if they do a simple kind of crime novel because all someone would have to do is [say] … 'give me this character, give me this situation, give me this geographic location' and let AI create a new book for them," he said. 

All this comes at a time when writers are already making significantly less income than they did in the past and there are fewer writing gigs available for them to use to fund their creative projects, making writing a novel increasingly unaffordable, says Ferguson. The author worked odd jobs for many years to support his writing before finally finding success with his detective series. 

For Heather O'Neill, the idea of machines churning out poems denigrates the people putting pen to paper to tell stories. When she heard her words and metaphors were scraped by AI, she said it felt like a "violation." 

"It's taking away from the human experience and the value of human experience," O'Neill said.