AI plagiarism: Z library no longer the biggest battle authors face

• Can AI commit electric plagiarism?
• Can use of generative AI to approximate a writer’s style be considered as plagiarism?
• Would authors prefer to be pirated than plagiarized?

AI plagiarism might be about to take Z library’s place as the plague of the literary world.

Earlier this year, when Z library was still making headlines, authors were united in the battle against piracy. Particularly vocal was the Authors Guild, which recently came to the defence of Professor Jane Friedman, an author who specializes in helping other writers get published.

She took to the-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter to decry Amazon after she discovered that books she didn’t write were being attributed to her.

Over the last 25 years, Friedman has written or contributed to 10 books on the industry. However, she hasn’t published anything new since 2018. When a reader reached out to her about more recent works, alarm bells rang.

Titles of what Friedman called “garbage books” included Your Guide to Writing a Bestseller eBook on Amazon, Publishing Power: Navigating Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, and Promote to Prosper: Strategies to Skyrocket Your eBook Sales on Amazon.

Friedman’s solid following is based on her work which includes similar titles like The Business of Being a Writer, What Editors Do, and Publishing 101.

When she contacted Amazon to get the faked books removed, the e-commerce giant refused, even though they were being traded on the basis of her name and reputation.

Because Friedman didn’t hold a trademark to her own name, she couldn’t get a straightforward copyright infringement case.  When she filed a report with Amazon, its response was to ask for “any trademark registration numbers that relate to your claim.”

In an article from Plagiarism Today, which Friedman retweeted, it’s pointed out that historically, authors have had two key battles: piracy and plagiarism. Both of these fall under copyright law – which is why Z library has been involved in legal proceedings.

However, a third issue has arisen out of the advent on generative AI. What Friedman is fighting can be described as “reverse plagiarism.”

Amazon’s stance was that unless the books copy text or other protectable elements from Friedman’s work, copyright doesn’t apply to these cases. Even though the books are likely AI-generated works based on Friedman’s content, there’s nothing to sustain a copyright infringement claim.

“We have clear content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale and promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised,” Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told Decrypt by email. “We welcome author feedback and work directly with authors to address any issues they raise, and where we have made an error, we correct it.”

Online, other authors shared similar stories. The Authors Guild also showed support.

Also speaking to Decrypt, the organization said, “We’ve worked with Amazon on this issue in the past, and we will continue our conversations with it about advancing its efforts to keep up with the technology.”

“Meanwhile, we encourage everyone to report these books that try to profit from your brand through Amazon’s complaint portal.”

The global infatuation with AI has been a sticking point for writers this year already. Film and television productions ground to a halt when the members of the WGA went on strike after negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers collapsed in May. When 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA also went on strike, their concerns were similar.

The capabilities of AI have caused many to wonder whether there’ll be jobs available to humans once its full capabilities are harnessed. For writers like Friedman, a future in which AI replaces people is fast becoming a reality.

Friedman wrote that she thinks “her” books were AI generated because “I’ve used these AI tools extensively to test how well they can reproduce my knowledge. I also do a lot of vanity prompting, like “What would Jane Friedman say about building author platform?”

In July, 10,000 members of the Authors Guild co-signed a letter calling on AI industry leaders to obtain consent from, credit, and fairly compensate authors.

The Guild also submitted written testimony to the Senate Intellectual Property Subcommittee for its July 12 hearing on artificial intelligence, underscoring the threat to “the written profession from unregulated use of generative AI technologies that can produce stories, books, and other text-based works and displace the works of human authors in the marketplace.”

Ironically, given the firm stance that many authors took against Z library’s provision of free books, Friedman’s take is that she “would rather see [her] books get pirated than this.”

The attention that Friedman’s tweet got meant that Amazon removed the books from its site. They’re now listed as not available to buy.

The fake books are still on Goodreads under Friedman’s name though, increasing her concern that AI generated work is going to ruin the credibility of authors’ real work.

The question of whether use of generative AI to mimic an author’s style counts as plagiarism has been debated by colleges and schools that worried students would use tools like ChatGPT to write assignments.

Further, because the Large Language Models that generative AI bots run on are trained on existing work, there’s an argument to be made that any content created by AI is, on some level, plagiarized. That’s an argument familiar from the world of art, where generative AI programs commonly take elements of human work and repurpose them without credit, premission, or remuneration.

Maya Shanbhag Lang, president of the Authors Guild, said, “The output of AI will always be derivative in nature. AI regurgitates what it takes in, which is the work of human writers. It’s only fair that authors be compensated for having ‘fed’ AI and continuing to inform its evolution. Our work cannot be used without consent, credit, and compensation. All three are a must.”

For now, Friedman is focusing on what she can control: her own writing. She said she’s revisiting her book the Business of Being a Writer.

 “At least now I will have a good story to include.”

Plagiarism – it’s not new, but it is getting cleverer.