Big Tech v. Me

The world's most powerful companies used my books, and millions more, without permission to train their AI models. I'm suing to stop them.

- J. B. MacKinnon

LAST APRIL, I WAS HIDING FROM THE WORLD in a whitewashed village among the low mountains north of Valencia, Spain, when I got a call from a lawyer friend of mine back in Vancouver.

Reidar Mogerman helped pioneer class-action law in Canada, and he had a proposal for me. He told me how American authors and lawyers had launched a wave of lawsuits against some of the world's biggest, richest tech companies, alleging that they'd used copyrighted books, without permission or compensation, to develop artificial intelligence.

Reidar saw potential for a similar case on behalf of Canadian writers. He wanted to know if I'd be the representative plaintiff—the person whose name would stand for every wronged writer in the suit. I was skeptical. I'm an author and journalist, but when I read news reports about copyrighted work being used to train AI, I never assumed my writing was included. Surely they couldn't have taken from everyone.

I asked how he could be sure that my books had helped develop AI models. Because, he said, his colleagues checked. Of the four copyrighted nonfiction books I've authored or coauthored, at least three—The 100-Mile Diet, The Once and Future World and The Day the World Stops Shopping—appeared in datasets known to have been used to train some of the world's biggest large language AI models. These systems analyze the material they're fed and discern patterns and associations so intricately that they can predict appropriate responses to an incredible array of human inquiries. The result is generative artificial intelligence: AI products that can speak human, such as ChatGPT. The datasets they feed on are huge digital repositories of human expression, containing literature, scientific papers, social media posts and far more. The law professor Edward Lee, from Santa Clara University, has described big tech's use of these datasets as "eating the world."