HAVE YOU SEEN THESE BOOKS?
BEWARE THE BOOK THIEF - WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE
This is an unplanned, unscheduled newsletter which I wanted to write, right now, because I’m mad as hell.
I’d like to report a robbery.
I’ve just learned that my four novels – Insatiable, Careering, Limelight and Pity Party – have been pirated by LibGen, a ‘shadow library’ made up of millions of books and articles that have been pirated. If an organisation wants to make use of your intellectual property – whether they want to read a bit out on the radio or take your idea and turn it into a musical – permissions must be sought, and fees must be paid. According to the Guardian, a group of authors have already sued Meta for training their AI bots on LibGen, knowing the data was pirated.
My books have been stolen. It’s hard for me to fully absorb that information when I can see them. I’m writing in bed, and the novels are lined up in front of me, on a high shelf. It’s as though I’ve been mugged, and yet I still have my handbag.
My novels are like diaries. They’re made-up stories about fictional characters, but they’re embroidered with real emotion and personal care. And they’re records of who I was, and where I was, when I was writing. I can remember working on Careering, specifically the scene with Harri and her bad boyfriend in the Soho hotel, while sitting at the desk in my old flat. I was gazing at the sea and trying to think hot hot thoughts while wiggling my cold toes, and wondering whether to keep writing, or to get up and put on an extra pair of socks.
Over 360,000 words of world building, weird connections, good days, bad days, joy and cold feet – have been taken, without my consent…
I can remember taking a day off from writing Limelight to see Abba Voyage. It was a sunny day in May, and I was filled with relief because I’d finally fixed the big structural issues, and I’d worked out how to get Frankie to solve her own problems instead of introducing new characters to rescue her. I wept throughout Abba Voyage. I’d grown up with this music, and I felt connected with my old self. Eight year old me would see ‘struggling to finish third novel’ as a delightful problem for 37 year old me to have.
I can remember sitting down to work on Pity Party and thinking that I didn’t feel particularly funny or creative and then making myself laugh out loud with a stupid joke about ghosts performing reiki. I can remember being away in France, trying to write a different book (The Sisterhood) and having the first 20,000 words of Insatiable fly out of my fingertips. I felt drunk on confidence, and joy and magic. I’d started to do the work I’d always dreamed of doing. The impossible felt possible, and fun.
Taking pirated books and feeding them to an AI machine is the biggest, most soulless brain pick of all time.
So these diaries – over 360,000 words of world building, weird connections, good days, bad days, joy and cold feet – have been taken, without my consent, and poured into a giant swirling vat of hundreds of millions of other words, alongside the words of many of my best friends, Lee Child and Agatha Christie. LibGen has set up a mise en place of delicious imagination, and Meta has blended the whole thing into a primordial soup of human endeavour.
One of my least favourite things is when a stranger, or a very new, vague acquaintance asks for a quick chat, saying ‘I must pick your brains.’ It’s a red flag. It’s code for ‘I see your body of work, your contacts and your career, and I must harvest them for my own ends as quickly as possible, before discarding your human, fibrous husk.’ The brain pickers are ravenous people with empty bowls. Where you and I see people, they see crawfish. Taking pirated books and feeding them to an AI machine is the biggest, most soulless brain pick of all time.
However, the trouble with brain picking is that it’s only briefly nourishing. Someone can pick my brains for information, without understanding that my brains are only worth picking because of the path I took, and the lessons I learned along the way. This is what gives me hope. Good storytelling requires dexterity, flexibility, belief in magic and the ability to suspend our disbelief. It definitely helps to have a loose, non-committal relationship with logic. And it’s supposed to be a slow process, a creative act that changes the writer, as well as the reader. You go in, not being entirely sure what’s going to come out.
I don’t understand how stealing millions of novels is going to do anything but clog up the machine. Why not throw in some Dan Brown, some Mary Gaitskill, some Rachel Cusk, some Lorrie Moore and the novels of Katie Price – and then wait for your stupid AI generator to churn out an email about the office stationery policy. To all staff: The theft of several boxes of paperclips is being investigated. We will determine the culprit by solving the cryptex. They will not be allowed to go horse riding. Meanwhile a list of your sexual neuroses will be pinned to the noticeboard.’
A billionaire has made his fortune by slowly, insidiously and irrevocably altering my relationship with myself and the people I love, over the course of twenty years. Not content with doing that, he’s taken my life’s work and rendered it worthless.
However, I should admit that my own novels are, in a way, AI creations. They might not exist in the same way if I hadn’t read Rachel Cusk, and Mary Gaitskill, and Lorrie Moore, and Katie Price’s autobiography and half The Davinci Code. All the art we make is in conversation with all the art that exists. I’m inspired by Bridget Jones Diary, which might not exist if Helen Fielding hadn’t been inspired on some level by Diary Of A Provincial Lady. Every weird connection is the subtle-yet-obvious child of every moment that we’ve ever lost ourselves in a story. The human brain gleans, gathers, builds and misremembers. It’s a slow cooker, and the flavour of the creative work that we make is something that takes years to develop. If you could press a button and absorb a 300 page novel in seconds, the flavours would be lost. You might be able to recall that there’s a big argument on P147, but you wouldn’t be able to talk about the emotions it evoked within you. The story wouldn’t inspire you.
Meta has already taken so much from me. I signed up to Facebook as a student. At the time I was enthusiastic about it, and I believed this social network would enhance my relationships and possibly help me to build brand new ones. Over time, my attention was hijacked, my concentration was drained, and my friendships were placed under pressure and scrutiny. Sometimes it made me feel excluded by the people I love and even estranged from them. Instagram has never brought me joy, but it has been the catalyst that has caused me to compare myself to pretty much every person I know and find myself wanting. (Last summer, my account was hacked and I was blocked from using it for six weeks. I didn’t care that I couldn’t post pictures of ice creams and trips to the beach, but I discovered that it had a deleterious effect on my career. I found it hard to launch new projects, because most of the organisations I was working with expected me to launch through the platform – and I wasn’t getting as much work as usual because I was invisible.)
I feel furious. Not usefully so, just hot, breathless, tearful and shaken. A billionaire has made his fortune by slowly, insidiously and irrevocably altering my relationship with myself and the people I love, over the course of twenty years. Not content with doing that, he’s taken my life’s work and rendered it worthless. What the fuck? What do I do now?
I keep writing. I go to work. I sit at my desk and I remember that my brains are juicy and fertile and all mine. I thank the lord and the universe for my curiosity, my imagination and my soul. I have been blessed and cursed with an insatiable appetite for storytelling, and storyseeking. It doesn’t matter how much the blank page terrifies me – it’s never going to frighten me so badly that I need to send a robot to do a human’s job.
And I beseech all of you to trust yourselves, and your work, and your words, and your worth. You don’t need AI to be creative. You don’t need to take shortcuts. Make work that lasts. Read as much as you can, and your work will be better and stronger than anything any machine can produce. And please buy as many books as you can afford, and if you can’t afford them, you can get them from the library. When we buy or borrow a book, we’re actively supporting the creative community. Every single one of us can be part of that community, if we choose to. Bring your vulnerability, your weirdness, your stupid jokes and your humanity. No robots allowed.
If you want to check to see if your work has been pirated by LibGen, you can use the Atlantic’s search tool here:
The Writers’ Guild has published advice for authors about piracy, which is available here
Daisy this is horrendous. I felt sickened and horrified just reading this so for you to be on the receiving end of this very real Kafkaesque nightmare doesn’t bear thinking about. It all feels so grubby. A class action is so very much needed. Of course Zuckerberg wont admit to doing any wrong. All he ever does is lie and take take take from us but somehow we must find the strength and courage to protect what is rightfully ours - and protect our values. Im so very sorry this has happened to you and others.
Yes! mine too. All five novels in four languages. Jon has had 19 novels used in about 12 different languages. we need to start a class action.