A multi-million selling Angus crime author is joining major music industry artists in the fight against their work being ‘stolen’ by global AI giants.
Former Carnoustie High School pupil Ed James swapped a career as an IT consultant to become a successful writer.
Ed, whose real name is James Thompson, has just launched the seventh book in his popular DCI Rob Marshall series.
He recently discovered all his books had been included illicitly in the pirated dataset a big tech company used to train its AI model.
Ed believes the UK government should act to protect artists by developing a licensing model. It would force tech firms to compensate artists for incorporating their work to train AI models.
He also backs a ‘royalty’ payment each time data is meaningfully used when generating AI answers.
Music artists launch silent album in AI protest
Authors across the world have voiced fears AI models, trained on their books, could soon be able to reproduce work in their style.
And in February, 1,000 musicians, including Annie Lennox, Kate Bush and Blur frontman Damon Albarn, released a silent album in protest against AI firms using their work to develop large language models.
Ed feels the balance is weighted too far in favour of the tech behemoths.
The 46-year-old is already preparing for his new book, Fear of any Kind, to be mined by AI developers.
“When you train large language models, it is hugely expensive in terms of chip hardware and energy,” he said.
“The big tech firms are paying for that hardware because they want to develop the best models.
“However, the output is only as good as the input.
“If they want the best output, they need to train their models on the best data. So they should pay for that too.
“Instead, one gigantic company has taken pirated material, while their pivot to AI has added trillions to their market capitalisation.
“Who is to say the others haven’t done the same?
“A lot of authors are rightly worried.”
Angus author Ed is not anti-AI
“What I think has to be the basic minimum is for AI firms to disclose the works included to train their models to date,” he said.
“Where there has been a use, there should be compensation to the creators.
“In future, there should be a licence fee to incorporate the work into training data sets – and the right to have your work excluded.”
Ed says he is not anti-AI, and uses artificial intelligence tools to streamline his own research.
“It is not technology that is evil,” he added.
“The problem comes from massive corporations having too much power without necessary checks and balances – or without permission from data providers.
“That has to stop.
“If companies want to ingest quality material, they should pay for that at a fair market rate.”
Fear of any Kind is now available on Kindle, audiobook and in print.
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