‘Not for machines to harvest’: Data revolts break out against AI

But in May, Loffstadt stopped posting her creations after she learned that a data company had copied her stories and fed them into the artificial intelligence technology underlying ChatGPT, a viral chatbot. Dismayed, she hid her writing behind a locked account.

Loffstadt also helped organize an act of rebellion last month against AI systems. Along with dozens of other fan fiction writers, she published a flood of irreverent stories online to overwhelm and confuse the data-collection services that feed writers’ work into AI technology.

“We each have to do whatever we can to show them the output of our creativity is not for machines to harvest as they like,” said Loffstadt, a 42-year-old voice actor from South Yorkshire in Britain.

Fan fiction writers are just one group now staging revolts against AI systems as a fever over the technology has gripped Silicon Valley and the world. In recent months, social media companies such as Reddit and Twitter, news organizations including The New York Times and NBC News, authors such as Paul Tremblay and actress Sarah Silverman have all taken a position against AI sucking up their data without permission.

Their protests have taken different forms. Writers and artists are locking their files to protect their work or are boycotting certain websites that publish AI-generated content, while companies like Reddit want to charge for access to their data. At least 10 lawsuits have been filed this year against AI companies, accusing them of training their systems on artists’ creative work without consent. This past week, Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and others over AI’s use of their work.

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The data protests may have little effect in the long run. Deep-pocketed tech giants like Google and Microsoft already sit on mountains of proprietary information and have the resources to license more. But as the era of easy-to-scrape content comes to a close, smaller AI upstarts and nonprofits that had hoped to compete with the big firms might not be able to obtain enough content to train their systems.