Margaret Atwood and Stephen King have responded to a recent Atlantic report that revealed that the tech company Meta used their books—without their permission—to train an artificial intelligence model.
The report, written by journalist and computer programmer Alex Reisner, found that Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, used more than 170,000 books to train LLaMA, a large language model, which generates prompt-driven text.
Atwood and King reacted to the news in a pair of essays for the Atlantic. In her response, Atwood invoked the 1975 movie The Stepford Wives, based on Ira Levin’s novel, about a town in which men’s wives are replaced with robot replicas.
“The companies developing generative AI seem to have something like that in mind for me, at least in my capacity as an author,” Atwood wrote. “To add insult to injury, the bot is being trained on pirated copies of my books. Now, really! How cheap is that? Would it kill these companies to shell out the measly price of 33 books? They intend to make a lot of money off the entities they have reared and fattened on my words, so they could at least buy me a coffee.”
King wrote that he looked at the possibility that AI might one day become sentient, and thus capable of creativity, with “a certain dreadful fascination.” But he is not worried—for now—that AI can replace human authors.
“AI poems in the style of William Blake or William Carlos Williams (I’ve seen both) are a lot like movie money: good at first glance, not so good upon close inspection,” he wrote. “Does it make me nervous? Do I feel my territory encroached upon? Not yet, probably because I’ve reached a fairly advanced age.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas
