Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI (2023)
Source: Getty.TechnologyRevealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AIStephen King, Zadie Smith, and Michael Pollan are among thousands of writers whose copyrighted works are being used to train large language models.By Alex ReisnerAugust 19, 2023 ShareSave Updated at 1:40 p.m. ET on September 25, 2023Editor’s note: This article is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. Check out our searchable Books3 database to find specific authors and titles.
- ▪Source: Getty.TechnologyRevealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AIStephen King, Zadie Smith, and Michael Pollan are among thousands of writers whose copyrighted works are being used to train large language models.B
- ▪ET on September 25, 2023Editor’s note: This article is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3.
- ▪Check out our searchable Books3 database to find specific authors and titles.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,686 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Atlantic |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/books3-ai-meta-llama-pirated-books/675063/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:01:26 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T02:31:19.838Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T02:31:19.838Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | S3GHerk2W_eo · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.TechnologyRevealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AIStephen King, Zadie Smith, and Michael Pollan are among thousands of writers whose copyrighted works are being used to train large language models.By Alex ReisnerAugust 19, 2023 ShareSave Updated at 1:40 p.m. ET on September 25, 2023Editor’s note: This article is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. Check out our searchable Books3 database to find specific authors and titles. A deeper analysis of what is in the database is here.One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It’s being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions, systems such as ChatGPT process huge quantities of written material.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Atlantic.
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