In Which I Reflect on the article from The Atlantic

It’s been a relatively quiet week since last we conversed. I mean, personally. On a larger scale everything is still the garbage fire it has been for who knows how long. We just found out that key members of the government treat acts of military aggression the same way cool kids try to decide what they are going to do over the weekend. And just like those cool kids, they accidentally include people that they didn’t mean to invite.

Ahem. Sorry about that.

I think we have pretty much settled back in to the being at home schedule. Cleaning, tax prep, all of that boring crap. There were a couple of family things done that I won’t discuss in public at this juncture (don’t worry, nothing bad). All in all, not a bad week, just not a whole lot to report on.

Hope none of y’all are trying to live vicariously through me.

Listening To: I just started Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. I’ve been waiting for this one to come out ever since I read about it.

Currently Reading: Edits and proofs, man. Edits and proofs. Oh, and stuff about contacting lawyers (see below).

Current Obsession: We finally started watching Penny Dreadful. Yeah, I know that we are a decade behind, but we don’t pay for any of those big movie type channels so we had to wait for the whole series to be available somewhere. We started it Sunday and finished the first season last night.

We received the pick ups from the Pleasure in Pain narrator and everything sounds good. The final version of the audiobook should be going to production soon. We’ll let you know when we have a release date.

The other big news was that we received a manuscript from a great writer that we have worked with in the past. Everything is kind of hush hush for now, but look for more information as situations warrant.

Our other project for the week has been looking into the number of our books stolen by Meta (read on).

Note: The official response from Dragon’s Roost Press can be found HERE.

First off, let’s get one thing clear, AI is anything but I — by which I mean that there is no intelligence in what people are calling artificial intelligence. Some of you have read this rant before, so I will be brief this time around. Calling something AI elevates it in the mind of many casual users to a level which it has not attained. Things like Meta’s Llama (and there is a reason I mention them, read on) are not the next level of actual autonomy that the name AI would imply.

This is not an accident. Those who own these learning machines and algorithms want people to think of them as less of a tool and more of a person. That way it becomes more palatable when they insist that the programs need to “learn” from outside material. Make no mistake. These things don’t learn, the appropriate material created and owned by others in order to create the data they need to function.

When a piece of art, say for example a book, is created in a tangible form, copyright attaches. No one else can use the art without the express permission of the artist. (You’ve probably seen the copyright notice in the front matter of every book you’ve ever bought.) You can’t, for example, buy a copy of the new Stephen King book, adapt it for the screen, and make a movie without getting Mr. King’s permission. This would be theft of intellectual property.

This is what Llama and similar systems have done and continue to do.

If you look at the history of any particular AI you will eventually find someone or group of someones who come to the realization that obtaining the type of massive data sets that they need to fuel their systems legally would be costly and take time. You can find any number of people who have said the equivalent of “well, that’s too hard, so we’re just going to take it.”

In other words, they see what they need and rather than attempt to obtain it legally, they say “fuck it.”

All of this has once again come to a head because of an article which appeared in The Atlantic this week (banner week for The Atlantic). Included in the article (CLICK HERE) is a place where you can enter an author’s name and see what books have been pirated by LibGen, the mouth that feeds Meta’s belly. A large number of authors published by Dragon’s Roost Press including many of our titles appear on this list. However, it should be noted that the court case filed by a group of authors against Meta and its owner Mark Zuckerberg has been ongoing since 2023.

The Meta attorneys claim that the use of the pirated items fall under the Fair Use Exclusion which allows portions of works to be used for the purposes criticism, education, and research among others. A helpful discussion of Fair Use can be found HERE. I maintain that the scope of the use (entire works and not portions of them), the fact that they are not used for educational purposes (remember how I mentioned it is important how AI is seen by the public?), and the fact that it is for a commercial purpose skew this far outside of Fair Use.

We will just have to see what a Federal Judge will say.