They've also scraped HackerNews posts. Since I posted blog links to HackerNews, does that mean they stole all of my blog posts? That represents three years of work and the chapters of 3 books that I intend to publish. They just took it and will start delivering it to their users to help them write more interesting content? Not okay.
This still seems to be happening two years later. A person complained about seeing a book sold under their name for 550 USD. It contained gibberish and the sales were recorded as income to the IRS even though the owner of the account couldn't find out where the money went. Amazon wouldn't tell her who had opened a bank account in her name. I suppose they prefer to deal with such accounts behind the scenes.
You can use major plot details from other books, the issue is how many and how sequentially arranged they can be. This author is dealing with several people who sat down and sequntially copied 35-45 plot twists/details on a page by page basis.
If you take 45 sequential, critical, unique lines of code or equations from a patented, copyrighted project, you could be in a lot of trouble. I think it is okay to take less than 14 sequential, unique plot elements but I'm not sure about how this would apply to lines of code made up of proprietary equations.
Those sorts of attacks work on an author who has only been ripped off by one publisher, but when there are six or seven, the attacker ends up looking like the nut job. Just wait until next year. Somebody delivered this as a poison pill to the whole industry. When the same new story shows up in seven locations within two years, bad actors are easier to identify.
When will non-creative folks realize that there is a difference between
8 words or concepts copied in series (derivative inspiration)
and
45 words or concepts copied in series (plagiarism)?
People hold about 8 sequential concepts in their working memory and can easily copy such a sequence without having the source material in front of them. If they have copied more than 14 sequential concepts, they are entering the legal grey area because they are clearly directly relying on having the source text sitting in front of them.
Kids learn in school that if you need to copy from a text that is sitting in front of you as you type, you need to cite it. Otherwise they are plagiarizing. Grown ups should be held to a similar standard and remember the value of human creativity that is unaugmented by copy and paste computing or AI spun word hash.
I've noticed that the AI generated texts in novels tend to lack narrative cohesion over more than a few paragraphs and that the people who use them often have a human write the beginning and the ending of the book and then the middle is just AI hash that looks perfectly okay if you only read a few pages, but if you actually read the whole book, you realize that the central portion is completely fragmented. If an AI read such a text and concluded that it was great based on stylistic elements and if an agent didn't actually read the book all of the way through, that tool could completely sink the publishing industry because the platforms woudl be saturated by books that are 90% unreadable by humans. You would end up engineering an illiterate population! Kids would pick up those books and not be able to follow the plot in the middle (because there isn't one) and then they would conclude that they don't like to read.