I’m sure by now that everyone’s heard the news that Meta has stolen millions of books and research papers and used them to train their AI programmes. They did it in full knowledge that this was theft. Staff at Meta discussed obtaining material legally and decided to steal it because it would be quicker and cheaper.
Just about every author I know has been affected. It makes me wonder why we still bother to write when our work is consistently undervalued, taken and used without our consent.
And then I thought back over last week, which was my last set of ‘World Book Month’ school events. Three days of encouraging children to use my Welsh folktales books as springboards for their own stories.
And I remembered that a few weeks ago, a teacher, Julian Rees, contacted me. He’d come across my Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins, and being a musician and composer as well as a teacher, he’d written a march to go with my stories of the giant Idris’s travels around Wales. Here it is, if you’re curious.
And, because once I started thinking about this, I found so many examples, I remembered my artist friend, Bonnie Hawkins, painstakingly creating characters inspired by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, and how I ran a workshop in the art gallery, creating a new ‘play for voices’ inspired by her artwork.
There is a Welsh word, ‘cynefin’, which means community, connection, belonging. A coming together of the multiple strands of our environment, our experiences, the people we live alongside. To me, this is how creativity is supposed to work. A story sparking off a piece of music, a play giving rise to a gallery of art, which gives rise to new writing. Creativity connects people together in a way that AI can never do.
This is why I’ll continue to write.
And here, in case you need them, are links to the Society of Authors and the Writers’ Guild, with advice on what to do if Meta has stolen your work.
https://societyofauthors.org/2025/03/21/the-libgen-data-set-what-authors-can-do/
https://writersguild.org.uk/libgen-database-advice-for-authors/
