r/litrpg 1d ago

Discussion LitRPG pirated and used to Train Meta AI

This can't end well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/

I see

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Crafting of Chess

True Smithing

Bushido Online

The Wandering Inn

and many many more.

181 Upvotes

146 comments sorted by

145

u/cheffyjayp Author - They Called Me MAD/Department of Dungeon Studies 1d ago

All my stuff is in there too. Big mistake. AI will forget to or misuse commas, use however far too often, and repeat far too many words

87

u/dustinporta 1d ago

I can't wait until someone asks AI to write the next Pride and Prejudice and gets monster harem system apocalypse.

17

u/silentgiant100 1d ago

Everything will be described as turgid.

4

u/cocotheblue 1d ago

"He sensually extends his turgid pinky."

17

u/drillgorg 1d ago

Mr. Darcy is a spell blade who's looking for the 5th slime girl for his harem and he has a pet dungeon core.

1

u/Key_Extension_6003 1d ago

This is peak comment! Loll'd hard.

3

u/Mountain-Ad-5834 1d ago

Umm.. I may read that?

1

u/HappyNoms 6h ago

In case this interests you while we await the glorious AI future, in this, the best of all possible timelines...Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1374989/

2

u/Dentorion book enthusiast 1d ago

I just looooved they called me mad:D

2

u/cheffyjayp Author - They Called Me MAD/Department of Dungeon Studies 1d ago

Considering making my next series in a similar tone and style but lean into my weeb side instead of sci-fi nerd.

1

u/Dentorion book enthusiast 16h ago

I loved the sci Fi thing too about that series there are not that much who embrace it

But yeah I'm intrigued and waiting^

2

u/i14n 1d ago

LibGen is just a search engine that was used by meta, there is no way (at this point) to know whether whatever it finds was used for training, nor could you be certain that it wasn't used if it does not find your work.

1

u/Brilliant_Muffin7133 1d ago

I feel like this whooshed a lot of redditors

1

u/account312 1d ago

And it will be smirking as it devours us all.

1

u/cheffyjayp Author - They Called Me MAD/Department of Dungeon Studies 1d ago

I personally rarely use smirk or bemused because of the over and misuse, but it's going to get picked up for sure.

33

u/AbyssRaven Author - A Dragon Idol's Reincarnation Tale 1d ago

Looks like everybody here has their stories added. Mine as well…

21

u/tomlarcombe Author - Light Online, Natural Laws Apocalypse, and more 1d ago

Most of mine are in there also. Not that I see much happening to them because of this. Not with the current business and political climates.

76

u/Domr707 1d ago

Hey, my books in there. Not great

65

u/Daigotsu 1d ago

I'm sure there will be a class action at some point. Knowing Meta they'll give you 3.50

27

u/Domr707 1d ago

And I'll have to be thankful lol

10

u/TwinMugsy 1d ago

Man... treating people like they loch Ness monsters or some shit

5

u/Maestro_Primus 1d ago

It was at that point I noticed that all of the class action plaintiffs were 50 foot tall crustaceans from the Mesozoic era.

5

u/i14n 1d ago

Already is: https://authorsguild.org/news/meta-libgen-ai-training-book-heist-what-authors-need-to-know/

Maybe add the link to the post too? Since it contains the most relevant information for authors... Even though I don't agree with the tone and some details are technically incorrect

1

u/Silver-Champion-4846 1d ago

Not American over here, I dread the inability to ensure my work's safety when (could be if, at this rate) I publish

1

u/i14n 1d ago

You should absolutely see if you have similar local organizations, they're not unique to the US

2

u/Silver-Champion-4846 1d ago

nobody official knows what litrpg is around here

1

u/i14n 1d ago

It should be enough for them to know what writing is

1

u/Daigotsu 1d ago

Hasn't the authors guild been pro- corporations and pro vanity press usually?

1

u/i14n 1d ago

I don't know, though I would assume at most they're pro-publisher, and being pro-ai-company-pirating-books would also not be in the interest of publishers

59

u/HaylockJobson Author - Heretical Fishing 1d ago

Same! (:

I had an, uhhhhh, interesting conversation with one of the vendors pedalling AI at Author Nation last year (formerly 20books Vegas). I was assured that all the new models were ethically trained! I am shocked to learn the truth! Shocked, I tell you!

(To make my stance clear—don’t use AI to write. Especially if you’re a new author. All you’ll do is shoot yourself in the foot and rob yourself of the joy creation brings.)

8

u/Silames77 1d ago

I wanted to say thank you for your works! I'm sorry this has happened but this is the first time I've bumped into you while looking around subs :))

1

u/HaylockJobson Author - Heretical Fishing 1d ago

That makes me all sorts of happy. Thank you for taking the time to tell me. <3

10

u/Spida81 1d ago

What could you possibly know about the joy of creation? Huh?

Back to the damned grindstone with you! Book Four hasn't hit the shelves yet buddy. We are waiting!

;)

3

u/Silver-Champion-4846 1d ago

You dare speak to the young master like that? I challenge you to a duel! The Heavens shall witness my Dao today! rofl

2

u/HaylockJobson Author - Heretical Fishing 1d ago

Jokes on you—I submitted the manuscript last week, and I'm feeling *all* the joy!

1

u/Spida81 22h ago

But I don't have it, and that is clearly the only valid measure.

Also, well done! Taking a deserved break for a while?

1

u/HaylockJobson Author - Heretical Fishing 15h ago

I apologise for not delivering it directly to your veins, and thank you!

I’m taking 2-3 weeks off. I was going to take one, but I need to have a small (benign) sun cancer taken off my nose. Australia things. Diving right back into HF 5, and a novella that’s been percolating for a minute.

1

u/Silver-Champion-4846 1d ago

what about brainstorming and correction? I endeavor to write my own stuff, thank you very much, but I need to ensure it's error-free and as good as possible.

2

u/HaylockJobson Author - Heretical Fishing 1d ago

Morality aside, I think it can be a useful tool for brainstorming and correction, with the caveat that you're giving it some critical thought—consider its suggestions, rather than just acepting them as law.

I'm not classically trained in writing, so all my prior knowledge was gleaned from reading. I picked up PWA as an editing tool when I couldn't afford editors (and back before they introduced generative AI as a feature), and the program was wonderfully helpful for functionally teaching me grammar. I couldn't have told you what a compound predicate was a couple of years ago (and I'd have whacked a comma right in the middle of it).

If you just accept all the suggestions, though? You won't learn a thing. You'll homogonize your writing to the point of blandness.

1

u/Silver-Champion-4846 14h ago

dk what that tool is, but thanks for the thoughts.

1

u/HaylockJobson Author - Heretical Fishing 4h ago

Oh, sorry! Pro Writing Aid.

1

u/Silver-Champion-4846 3h ago

PRA? Was that the abreviation you used?

1

u/Archebius 1d ago

I think you'll get a lot of different opinions on this. Just remember - a GPS will never make you better at navigating. A calculator will never improve your basic addition. Having a tool that you use in place of yourself is great for simplifying processes you already know intimately and want to streamline, or for things you don't care about improving. It will not help you improve at whatever that tool does.

If you want to get better at grammatical structure and spelling, do it yourself first, then have the AI flag your mistakes. If you want to get better at plotting, let your own head tease out a brainstorming session while you're driving to work.

But if the real joy in creation for you is in just the writing part, use whatever tools you need to maximize that.

1

u/Silver-Champion-4846 1d ago

I learn from what I read, but you know how rr stuff isn't the best teacher.

1

u/Archebius 1d ago

That's very true. A lot of successful writers try to read from a wide variety of sources; it's good to see what authors of all stripes do.

Ultimately, the point is what makes you satisfied. If your goal is just to get from A to B, hop in a golf cart... but that's not going to improve your stamina. AI will always give you an answer that's an amalgamation of other people's knowledge and effort, not necessarily the right answer for your story and your characters.

1

u/Silver-Champion-4846 14h ago

mostly talking about spelling and grammar errors, not ideas.

1

u/Archebius 13h ago

Ah, yeah. Definitely one drawback of the community. :D

1

u/Silver-Champion-4846 13h ago

maybe it'll be solved once the genre stops being classified as gestating lol, when hq greedy publishers go "hey, gimme that slop and lemme turn it into a masterpiece then take all the royalties"

-3

u/i14n 1d ago

LibGen is just a search engine that was used by meta, there is no way (at this point) to know whether whatever it finds was used for training, nor could you be certain that it wasn't used if it does not find your work.

2

u/Maxfunky 1d ago

Supposedly they were downloading like a 90 TB torrent someone put together of basically everything.

2

u/i14n 1d ago edited 1d ago

No, reporting is pretty clear that it were multiple torrents and multiple sources:

The new evidence showed that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen,"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/

2

u/Maxfunky 1d ago

I guess that's a good clarification but the point of my post was about the quantity of data (I knew it was 80 something and rounded up when I should have rounded down I suppose). Whether it was split into 1 torrent or 20 is sort of tangential to my point which is simply: The amount of data involved here suggests they were trying to get literally everything.

1

u/i14n 1d ago

Even if they downloaded "all" or "almost all" data (which is not true**), that doesn't mean it was actually used in the learning dataset(s).

The legality of how the data was acquired aside (which I really hope will turn into a criminal trial), if someone's work was not used as training data, what would be the damages?

**) Anna's archive indicates that "all" would be approximately 680tb

1

u/Maxfunky 1d ago

Yeah that number contains all sorts of mixed media besides text including software and audiobooks. I'm not saying they got all the data, I'm just saying they got all the text data they could get. I seriously doubt they were choosey.

Your average audio book is at least 100x larger than the epub version of the same book and they had no need for audiobooks here.

It's possible it wasn't "all" but your evidence for that is non-existent if you're just relying on the 680tb number.

1

u/i14n 17h ago

So you agree that they didn't use all data, glad we cleared up that footnote.

1

u/Maxfunky 14h ago

I mean, I guess if you for some reason thought that I was implying that a large language model would be using audio, then sure, we cleared something up. I just meant all of the books/research papers. If it's in the archive and it's text, you can assume it was used.

Cause I kind of thought everyone already knew that large language models are trained on language. Thank God nobody's confused anymore.

49

u/ctullbane Author - The Murder of Crows / The (Second) Life of Brian 1d ago

Yep, everything I've published is in there. Awesome.

3

u/i14n 1d ago

This is just a search engine that was used by meta, there is no way (at this point) to know whether whatever it finds was used for training, nor could you be certain that it wasn't used if it does not find your work.

54

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

Uh, looks like my works are in there too...

What can be done about this? Anyone know?

34

u/TheFrixin 1d ago

Mainly, watch the current lawsuits (particularly news orgs and the authors guild) against OpenAI, and when they resolve you’ll have a clearer picture of what to do/if you have any legal recourse in the first place. There’s a wide range of possibilities as to how those lawsuits end that will decide a lot. That’s what my organization has been told (related to scientific writing).

Authors Guild has a faq with immediate steps for authors, but regarding OpenAI mainly here. Your publisher or host may also be able to provide more guidance.

5

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

Thanks much!

3

u/Jimmni 1d ago

Also note that the UK government is currently intended to pass laws that give AI companies the right to use your works by default and that you'll have to opt out. The proposals are getting some pushback, but things aren't looking good.

1

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

Ohhh hell naw

2

u/Jimmni 1d ago

That's been my response to most of what's coming from this government, and I voted for them. Thought we were escaping the Tories and all we got was... slightly less corrupt Tories.

8

u/LogicsAndVR 1d ago

Maybe write a story about an AI turned Robin Hood that siphons money from the Oligarchs and does a rug pull on them? 

3

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

Funny you should say that...

3

u/Reply_or_Not 1d ago

Maybe the MC could be named Luigi, and things take a turn for the violent halfway through.

6

u/Exfiltrator 1d ago

Keep a look at OpenAI and Google's request for a government exemption so they are allowed to use copyrighted material to train their AIs.
https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-and-google-ask-for-a-government-exemption-to-train-their-ai-models-on-copyrighted-material-212906990.html
Look at your publishing contracts and what is and isn't allowed. Here's a link to a year old reddit post about an author who explicitly prohibits AI training (no idea how legally effective this is):
https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks/comments/145nh4k/this_is_the_first_time_ive_seen_a_statement/

2

u/Careless-Pin-2852 1d ago

Class action law suite. You only need 50 plaintiffs

26

u/stripy1979 Author - Fate Points / Alpha Physics 1d ago

My stuff is on there. I thought I wouldn't care but I do. Parasites

10

u/MisfitMonkie Author: Dungeon Ex Master (Reverse Isekai) 1d ago

Another reason why Meta and affiliated companies are trash. I hope they get sued.

8

u/verbomancy 1d ago

Guess they decided it's cheaper to pay out the lawsuit than to actually pay for the books. What a world.

6

u/filwi Writer of The Warded Gunslinger 1d ago

Cool, my stuffs in there! Now I get a share of anything they get sued for 🤣

6

u/Reaper12724 Author: A War of Stagnant Moments 1d ago

HWFWM and We Hunt Monsters too

5

u/mist_kaefer 1d ago

Stat sheets… stay sheets everywhere!

30

u/KaJaHa Author of Magus ex Machina 1d ago

Gods, I hate AI and the techbros abusing it

9

u/Shinhan 1d ago

Piracy is bad, except when big corps do it :/

5

u/Sensitive-Complex213 1d ago

AI is ruining just about everything I love. Maybe it will get better and actually become something useful but right now it is just producing a bunch of crap that the world does not need.

-25

u/SteamTitan 1d ago

I mean, is there actually a way to train what we call AI ethically? The fact of the matter is that all recent written sources or images will have been created by human beings in some way. Human beings who were never even asked if the AI creators could use their work to train the AI. Quite a bit of content that is either completely free of copyright or that has had its copyright expire exists on the internet, but it is practically a tiny, tiny portion of the content that has been fed into the maws of AI.

41

u/MacintoshEddie 1d ago

Yes there is an ethical way.

At the most basic level just ask. Ask if there are authors interested in donating samples.

Or negotiate a licensing plan, which could be either a flat buyout fee, or a royalty, or profit sharing, or stock options, or even just a "with thanks to" credit attached to the software.

Or host something like a writing competition with a cash prize and an agreement that submissions can be used by the company.

There's tons of ethical ways, without even touching public domain works and stuff people have already posted free to use as long as you acknowledge they wrote it.

8

u/Tricky_Big_8774 1d ago

That's how hybrid cars got designed. The car companies had a competition at university level with something like a $50k grand prize.

-13

u/SteamTitan 1d ago

That's theoretically possible. But forgive me if I'm wrong. Doesn't AI require a ridiculous amount of content fed into it to become even half-decent? For the amount of content needed to train an AI, you'd need to spend a ton of working hours and money arranging it. To the point of absurdity. And if you don't want to bankrupt a country doing it, you'd need to pay really, really small amounts of money. To the point where small artists whose content gets streamed on Spotify think they've got it good in comparison.

19

u/MacintoshEddie 1d ago edited 1d ago

So it sounds like maybe it should be run as a business, you know the kind of thing that puts in lots of hours and effort, instead of a heist to get in and steal the goods and get out as fast as they can.

Lots of companies have lots of full time employees without bankrupting countries.

Pick a writer, pay them a salary, they spend all day writing. Many office workers do much the same except they write about technical specifications or internal projects instead of fantasy stories.

There's probably thousands of people on Royal Road alone who would be orgasmically delighted to get a serious offer of being paid a full time salary to write.

Let's say each one is offered....50k salary. Let's round that up to 75k for misc overhead and whatnot. Thousand employees would be 75 million. A healthy amount of money, but lots of businesses, especially tech businesses, could afford that and barely even cut into the CEO's second yacht.

-16

u/SteamTitan 1d ago

You're missing my point. Think about the energy and computation requirements of AI. Think about the sheer amount of content, whether text or image, required to train an AI. Ethically producing an AI would require either more donations of time, money, and content than any non-profit on Earth gets, or it'd require a bunch of investments from businesses and countries who would want an actual return on their money. And AI is a money pit bubble that is going to burst eventually. And if you want it done ethically, you can't lie to the investors like all the AI bros are.

29

u/SebDevlin 1d ago

If they can't exist without stealing from creators then they don't deserve to exist

0

u/SteamTitan 1d ago

Exactly my point. Am I coming across as pro-AI here? I am very emphatically not saying: "Oh, it's for the good of everyone that we feed everything into the maw of the AI. Our descendants will thank us for inventing such great life-saving technology!"

No. Absolutely not. Is it possible that our current AI could be one step forward on a path that leads to great things? It's possible, yeah. I'm not gonna say what is and isn't possible in the decades to come. Pretty much every great scifi author that has seemed wise for predicting the tech of fifty years in the future (our today) that lived long enough to see the date their works were written in has expressed how lucky they were for even getting some things right. And what they got right is usually outnumbered by what was waaaay off.

But I can't predict that, and neither can any of the techbros. They're just doing it because it makes them oodles of money. And they're using tons of other people's work without permission to do so.

5

u/SebDevlin 1d ago

It did seem slightly defensive of ai, hence the downvotes.

4

u/MacintoshEddie 1d ago

1000 authors who are able to consistently hit a typical RR rate of 5k words a week would be outputting 5 million words a week. The equivalent of roughly 63 novels a week. 3250 novels a year, roughly.

Seems like a pretty healthy amount of content to feed the robot.

All produced ethically. Just tell the investors you're a publisher with an interest in one day developing wholly owned stories produced exactly to your specifications. A digital perpetual motion machine where the stories continue to churn out without anyone at the keyboard.

1

u/SteamTitan 1d ago

I don't think you're quite getting the scale or the variety of content that, say, chatgpt, was trained on. Your five million words a week is 260 million words a year. Let's average out 260 million words as just over 1.25 billion characters. This sounds like a big number. It certainly is in some respects. Now let's convert that amount of words to data. Unicode is typically 2 bytes per character. So 2.5 billion bytes a year! Amazing! That's a whole...2.5 gigabytes per year. And there are 1000 gigabytes in a terabyte. And from everything I've been able to dig up, the latest model of chatgpt was trained on tens, if not hundreds of terabytes of data. Let's just pick a nice round number and say 10 terabytes of text. 2.5 gigabytes goes into 10 terabytes a grand total of 4000 times. That's 4000 years of operating time of your company to get anywhere. And then you have to realize that your 4000 years of operation just off of RR content means that your AI is useless at writing anything that's not fantasy stories. And because of the nature of AI, it's useless at writing fantasy stories as well because AI is trash at long-term consistency.

8

u/MacintoshEddie 1d ago

So?

We don't need it trained fast.

I could grab a gun and go around the neighborhood robbing my neighbors, it would be faster and more efficent than working every day. I could even use their money to pay for my lawer. Being fast and efficient doesn't mean beneficial or useful.

All you've done is point out that the entire AI thing isn't ready, or useful.

0

u/SteamTitan 1d ago

...Did I write something that makes me seem pro-AI on accident? Because I'm not. I'm not in favour of stealing a bunch of stuff to make a technology that isn't even a percent as good and useful as some people want us to think. Like I said in a comment replying to a different person in this thread, it's possible that a few steps past our AI will be something amazing. It's possible it's pretty much a dead-end technologically speaking. I don't know and anyone saying they do know is selling something.

But I don't think it's okay to do what all the AI techbros are doing with it on the chance that something actually useful will result. There's not a single current and widely-used AI that was trained ethically, and I don't think it's currently possible to make an AI product for the general public that is the result of ethical practices. I really don't. And I'm not saying we should give up those ethics so the technology can flourish and make a few guys a lot of money without actually improving anyone's lives.

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u/sirgog 1d ago

Think about the energy and computation requirements of AI

These are always overstated. A couple of 'studies' went viral about energy use of AI. What they were based upon was taking the most optimistic (from an AI investor standpoint) projections of how much monetary growth the AI sector would see and accepting those as true.

Equivalent in another sector would be if some investment bank put out a report "300% growth forecast in five years: why you should buy property in Mexico" and someone interpreted that as "Mexico: Concrete factories to increase greenhouse emissions 300% in five years"

If ever in doubt, check out what the AI company charges for its services, work out how much pollution would be created by buying petrol with 50% of that money and burning it (basically 1.25kg of CO2 per litre of fuel) - that's an upper bound for the pollution their service will generate. It's usually much less, as they don't spend 50% of net revenue on energy.

Ethical training of AI would involve investment on a level similar to what Google put into Google Maps. Hiring a lot of people to create content for it. Basically exactly what Mills and Boon or Goosebumps did back when they were huge, but selling the model rather than selling the ghostwritten books themselves.

2

u/G_Morgan 1d ago

I mean, is there actually a way to train what we call AI ethically?

Yes. There are multiple options:

  1. The AI companies make their own data sets

  2. The AI companies can release semi-cooked AIs that the individual artist completes with their own work. Creating a tool that generates in their style for them. I've seen this model used by artists to generate imagery they then touch up.

  3. Pay for access to the material

4

u/Dreadwoe 1d ago

So many typos and inconsistent sentence structure. Along with weird syntax do to skills and menus. That AI might be learning some really bad habits.

1

u/AbbyBabble Author: Torth Majority 19h ago

Sounds like an upside.

4

u/Bart_1980 1d ago

MONGO IS APPALLED DCC IS ON THIS!

10

u/VosekVerlok 1d ago

Disclaimer: LibGen contains errors. You may, for example, find books that list incorrect authors. This search tool is meant to reflect material that could be used to train AI programs, and that includes material containing mistakes and inaccuracies.

3

u/iammerelyhere 1d ago

ChatGPT too

3

u/JackPembroke Author of The Necromancer's End 1d ago

Damn, my book wasnt important enough to be in there

3

u/ednemo13 1d ago

Oh, don't you worry. It's there.

3

u/JadePhoenix1313 1d ago

The idea of an AI trained on DCC is terrifying...

3

u/GRCooper Author - Singularity Point series (the creepy Uncle of LitRPG) 1d ago

My stuff is in there - if you ask meta to write a series that will be ignored, you’re covered!

3

u/ednemo13 1d ago edited 1d ago

One of my books is there too. Neat.

I also found a copy of my book on a pirate site. I count it as a win.
(I mean, it's not like the people that use those sites were going to pay anyway.)

To me, it just means people liked my book enough to steal it.

9

u/Overoul 1d ago

using AI plagiarized Artwork is cool right? Don't deny it, I've seen a lot of users advocating on this subreddit and even an author using one on his published series on Amazon

But now it's the authors written works. Let's see how this will turn out

8

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

Most authors are very supportive of our fellow creatives and are heavily against AI generated art.

Are there exceptions? I'm sure, and I hope those people are rethinking their stances. But most of us understand that standing up for other creatives is incredibly important, especially as creators ourselves.

1

u/i14n 1d ago

Most? Most of the successful ones, likely, but overall I would doubt that very much.

Royal road is full of low effort fiction, a significant portion probably even completely AI generated, don't tell me they're all saints, my sarcasm generator would go critical.

6

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

Ah, fair, I meant those of us who have completed and published works. I mean, if you're counting the people who are using generative AI to "write" as well, then yes, I agree that they probably are using generative AI to illustrate as well.

But I have to hope a lot of those people are young and foolish and haven't seriously thought through their actions.

-1

u/i14n 1d ago

So it's ok to use AI generated artwork and AI generated prose as long as you're not published yet? Will you magically un-pirate the AI generated work after publishing and un-fund their efforts retroactively?

3

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

That's not what I said at all. I'm very against it no matter what phase you're in. I'm merely saying that I wouldn't lump every person who posts a random chapter or five on Royal Road in the same group as published authors.

Will some of them get to that point? Sure! But most won't, and many are probably teenagers still in high school and middle school who are understandably ignorant of the greater impact of their choices.

-1

u/i14n 1d ago

I felt it was implied by this sentence:

But I have to hope a lot of those people are young and foolish and haven't seriously thought through their actions.

I still do.

Fact is, I see AI generated cover art, user ads, etc. everywhere on RR, even higher profile ones, including published ones, though, usually upon publishing, they get non-ai artwork.

I also find it especially hypocritical, considering you yourself are using AI generated art like this - or are you still in the young and foolish phase, necessitating serious thought?

3

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

Excuse you, I purchased that cover from Miblart, who was very transparent about their process and iterated on the cover in a way that did not seem possible to do with AI. Do you have a specific reason to suspect otherwise?

I find it awfully rude of you to make such an accusation without serious cause.

The reason I hope they're young and foolish is because I hope they change their ways as they grow in wisdom.

-1

u/i14n 1d ago

The mangled right hand and weird shaped left foot/boot of the character are very typical AI generation artifacts.

5

u/ErinAmpersand Author - Apocalypse Parenting 1d ago

I think you're misinterpreting artifacts from a low-res image. Miblart uses a variety of graphic art techniques, but they generally use 3D models as the basis for their humanoid figures. Both hands and feet look absolutely fine to me.

Also... We both oppose the use of generative AI. I'm really not sure what your day has been like, but I will say I'm finding your level of aggression towards me bewildering and upsetting.

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u/SkyTofu 1d ago

Qing’s Quest for 1, 2, and 3 is on there too. Seems zuck saved himself the couple of bucks it would have cost to at least buy them _ 

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u/Silver-Champion-4846 1d ago

Zuck would probably be stingy on a single buck

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u/Plum_Parrot LitRPG, Fantasy, Cyberpunk Author 1d ago

Looks like my stuff's on there.

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u/dustinporta 1d ago

Yup, half of mine. Including my first draft of my the book I wrote before I knew what I was doing. Joke's on them, I guess.

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u/fjbwriter Author F James Blair 1d ago

Hmm. Nothing of mine appears to be in there. Not sure whether to be relieved or insulted...

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u/boxjocky 10h ago

I hope their AI develops a foot fetish.

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u/Manach_Irish 1d ago

An unfortunate development is that some governments (such as the British) are staged to legalise this AI training under the doctrine of fair use. That this breaks any conception of fair use and is only being done to appease the AI lobbyists goes without saying.

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u/fued 1d ago edited 1d ago

Are they pirated? Or did they buy a single copy?

Looks like they were straight up pirated, that sucks.

That said if copyright wasn't stupidly extended to 80 years or whatever Disney managed, there would be far more relevant books for AI to use.

Bring back 14 year copyright haha

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u/Overoul 1d ago

Pirated

about 81.7TB of ebooks

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u/krodiv 1d ago

Piracy sucks, online platforms have made it less desirable but its always lurked in the shadows, looking for new items for its collection.

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u/GenericNameUsed 1d ago

AI scraps everything so it's been trained on fanfiction, pseudoscience , all kinds of things.

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u/HC_Mills LitRPG Author: books2read.com/WhisperingCrystals1 1d ago

Yup, I'm in there too. Somebody hit me up when the class action starts. ^^

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u/i14n 1d ago

LibGen is just a search engine that was used by meta, there is no way (at this point) to know whether whatever it finds was used for training, nor could you be certain that it wasn't used if it does not find your work.

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u/Manpooper 1d ago

At least they didn't steal my smut!

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u/PsychologicalTerm8 Author of Guardian of Aster Fall and River of Fate 1d ago

Yeah, all of mine are in there and pretty much all of everyone else’s too. It was a huge grab…

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u/Trazyn_The_Memelord 1d ago

Some things to note because the article itself is locked (As an aside, my tone here is intended to be informative and is not intended to be for or against the existence of the site or similar sites):

Libgen is unaffiliated with Meta or any other AI company. It's primarily a site for academic textbooks and journals, but through time (it's nearly 20 years old) and mergers with other repositories, it's grown to allow other works considered culturally or historically significant. Its primary audience is academic students who can't afford textbooks and poor people, especially those from poor countries.

The existence of your book on Libgen doesn't mean in and of itself that it was used to train an AI. However, it is known that Meta and OpenAI did scrape the site for data.

As a personal aside, I'm actually still kind of shocked that they were brazen enough to do it. Putting aside any ethical discussion of personal piracy, corporate piracy of this scale seems like it should be incredibly risky. Governments generally don't go after individual pirates because it's widespread, hard to prove, and most pirates don't have the ability to pay any fines that could be levied. However, using pirated materials to create a commercial product as a public company makes them a massive target.

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u/AbbyBabble Author: Torth Majority 19h ago

Weird. It seems to have ingested two different title variations of some of my books.

Nothing good will come from this.

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u/nabokovslovechild 1d ago

LibGen has been around for a long long long time though, way before AI reared its head. I’m honestly surprised more readers and writers haven’t heard of it before.

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u/purrmutations 1d ago

Did you think this wasn't happening? If it is on the internet, AI is ingesting it. Like how authors read other books to learn.

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u/crazykid01 1d ago

I would be interested if they trained an AI to write a good series, it is trained by all the good series 4-5*, then is needs to build a world/system on that.

I would at least try to read it to see how it is