Are Human Companies Less Trustworthy than AI?

Recently, The Atlantic magazine reported that Meta had used Libgen (Library Genesis), a vast database of pirated material, to train its AI models. I had concerns that AI was infringing my — and other writers’ — copyrights but is it AI that is in the wrong?

AI is a tool, and tools can be used for both good and evil.

It’s not the tool that causes the damage but the person who uses it.

For example, AI can be used to diagnose some illnesses more accurately and more quickly than humans, but it can also be used for scamming and plagiarising authors’ work.

In My Book is Being Scraped by AI, I described how I was alerted to the possibility of my copyrights being infringed by AI.

So, I used the search engine provided by The Atlantic magazine, and my book, Managing the Training Processes, appeared in the results:

Following the link, I discovered that a digital version of my book was being sold by Emerald Publishing.

The Journal of European Industrial Training is an imprint of Emerald Publishing Limited.

I contacted them by email with the following message:

It has been brought to my attention that you are selling my book, Managing the Training Process for £29.00 on your website:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/03090599410062507/full/html

It has had 4352 downloads, but I am not receiving any royalties. Please send the royalties that you owe me.

I would also like to know who gave you permission to sell my book, because McGraw-Hill transferred the rights to Gower, who transferred all rights — including digital — to me when the second edition of my book went out of print.

I didn’t receive a reply, so I sent them a signed-for letter. The Royal Mail’s website confirmed that the letter was received, but I still didn’t get any response.

You will notice that 22 copies of my book were downloaded between contacting Emerald Publishing and taking the above screenshot. McGraw-Hill might have given Emerald Publishing the right to publish a digital version of the first edition of my book. Even if this is true, they should be paying me royalties.

I could take legal action or join a writers’ union, but both of these options are expensive.

Rather than buying a digital copy of the first edition of my book from Emerald Publishing for £29, readers can buy a hard copy of the second edition from the Learning Pages Bookshop for only £12.95!

I am currently working on the third edition of Managing the Training Process.
Learning Pages members will be able to read it online or download a PDF version:

So far, I have finished the introductory pages and first chapter (The Process of Training).

Conclusion

It wasn’t AI that decided to:

• Create a website of pirated material,
• Use LibGen for training AI models and
• Sell my book without paying me royalties.

Looking deeper into the infringement of my book’s copyright and noting that companies like Getty Images are suing other companies— not AI, I am convinced that it is human organisations that can be untrustworthy.

After all, can non-sentient entities like AI be assigned attributes like infringement, honesty, scamming and theft?