Marian Keyes among authors publishing empty book in AI protest

Thousands of writers have joined the Don't Steal This Book campaign

Over 10,000 authors have published an 'empty book' to protest AI companies using their work, without permission, to train AI models.

The back of the cover states: ‘The UK government must not legalise book theft to benefit AI companies’.

The UK government will issue an update on the economic impact of changes to copyright law. Creatives are protesting against the relaxation of this copyright law, which proposes allowing AI firms to use copyright-protected work to train AI models without the owner's permission.

The campaign, which was launched by Ed Newton-Rex, is in protest over AI using writers' work. It comes after AI firm Anthropic used pirated copies of books to train its AI model, Claude chatbot. They failed to ask permission from the authors to use their work.

They paid €1.28bn to settle a lawsuit that was issued by Kirk Wallace Johnson, Andrea Bartz, and Charles Graeber.

Speaking about the campaign, Ed Newton-Rex stressed that AI is "built on stolen work, taken without permission or payment."

As per The Guardian, he said:

"This is not a victimless crime – generative AI competes with the people whose work it is trained on, robbing them of their livelihoods. The government must protect the UK’s creatives and refuse to legalise the theft of creative work by AI companies.”

Copies of Don't Steal This Book will be distributed at the London Book Fair on Tuesday, March 10th.

See the full list of authors here.