It took me less than a minute to confirm my book had been pirated.
I typed “Drifts, Natasha Burge” into the database search bar and there it was, multiple mirror sites offering free downloads of something that took me years to write. What’s more, this database of pirated books, including Drifts, was used by Meta and OpenAI to train their AI programs.
What I felt in that moment of discovery might surprise you.
Right now in the writing world, AI is a hot topic.
1. Authors are denouncing AI as the end of creativity.
2. Authors are upset that their books were used to train AI without their permission or without giving them credit or compensation.
Let’s start with the first point.
Is AI the death of art?
Artists often predict doom when it comes to technological advances: synthesizers were going to be the death of music, the personal computer was the end of literature because it would make writing too easy and fast, and when film emerged it was called a shallow gimmick that would debase true artistic expression.
We tend to see the technology we grew up with as normal and benign, while seeing anything newer as unnatural, threatening, or dystopian. Yes, for some artists the fear of AI is justified, just as it was for manuscript scribes replaced by the printing press - but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have invented the printing press. To forcibly preserve the artistic status quo is to risk stagnation and to silence creative expressions we haven’t yet imagined.
When cameras were first introduced, people said photographers weren’t real artists because the machine did all the work. But I have a camera, and I’m no Avedon or Leibovitz. I don’t reject the work of artists who use cameras, iPhones, Photoshop, spell check, Google, Scrivener, Procreate, Lightroom, green screens, MIDI controllers, Auto-Tune, tablets, transcription software, citation generators, archival data bases, or any of the other technology that has become widespread in the art world.
We don’t lose our creativity when new technologies arrive, we gain new genres, new aesthetics, and new ways of expressing ourselves.
I’m particularly excited to see the creations of writers using AI to carry forward the lineage of surrealism, Dada, and experimental writing. I can imagine bold new ventures that build on cut-up methods, collage, automatic writing, and chance operations. These artistic traditions embraced randomness and iteration, consciously playing with the technologies of their time without thinking it diminished the authenticity of their vision.
Some critics believe all AI-assisted art will be soulless and rob artists of the struggle inherent to the creative process. I find this unconvincing. I’ve seen plenty of non-AI art that I find soulless and I’ve seen AI-assisted work I find thoughtful and poetic. I also don’t think misery is needed to make art meaningful. Not all good art is born from hardship, and not all hardship produces good art. In fact, for some artists - like disabled artists - AI will expand creative possibilities by making the act of creation more accessible.
Art has always been shaped by the tools at hand, they don’t replace our vision, they help us express it more clearly. AI is a tool and when artists fear it or exalt it, we give it more power than it deserves.
That being said, there will be pitfalls. Some people will use AI in creatively stunting ways. I’ve seen authors speak about losing their sense of creative identity after relying on it too heavily, and this is a caution worth heeding. Artists will need inner conviction and discernment to safeguard their vision.
But I can’t imagine true artists ever being content to farm out their most sublime impulses to a machine. AI is a mimic, it can’t replace voice, vision, or principles. The writers I know are so single-minded they agonize over tone, structure, even the tiniest choice of punctuation, too devoted to their own voice to ever abdicate judgement. At the heart of writing there is a moment of ecstatic transcendence when it feels like you as the artist are merely the conduit to something far beyond yourself. No machine can replicate that.
I speak from experience when discussing creativity and artistic expression.
I wrote two published books (and got two master’s degrees and a PhD) before AI was available, back when it wasn’t even accessible to writers, let alone something to fear. So I know firsthand that writing often involves editors, research assistants, and beta readers; it is an ever-shifting craft shaped by collaboration and the tools of the time. Now, AI is one the tools writers have to support their work, using it to research ideas, sharpen language, and enhance the creative process.
When used well, AI won’t thwart creativity, it will turbocharge it.
Now the second point: Did AI Steal My Voice?
My book, Drifts, was part of the database used by Meta and OpenAI to train their AI. I was not asked my permission nor was I given credit or compensation - nor were any of the authors in my position. Many writers feel exploited.
When I discovered Drifts was part of the dataset, I wondered how it was even legal. The answer is that is it legal for now because companies argue that using pirated books to train AI falls under “fair use” because the process does not result in AI reproducing the original work - which would be plagiarism. Rather, AI studies patterns from vast datasets in order to learn how language works.
Legality aside, it is unethical that some of the richest corporations in the world used pirated books to train their AI without credit or compensation to the authors. The authors deserve credit and compensation.
There are some who insist that these dubious ethics mean we should boycott AI on moral grounds – but I disagree. Using a tool that exists is not the same as endorsing the way it was made - just look at the ethics of the production of the smartphones we all use.
So how do I feel about the fact that Drifts was part of the database used to train AI?
Well, I would rather Drifts be in that dataset than not.
To quote Brian Mattson: AI is akin to a student—an unbelievably brilliant student—who was assigned a reading list of millions of books. In that scenario, I want AI to be influenced by my scholarship and writing.
Art is a constantly evolving ecosystem.
It has always been a turbulent realm of influence, adaptation, and reinvention. Our tools might change, but the human impulse to create something remains: to make – and remake – something out of what already exists. Writers are always remembering and recombining, even when we are not conscious of it; to deny that is an act of hubris. What is unique is the constellation our inspirations form inside of us.
And just as artists once adapted to the camera and the word processor, we will learn to work with this new tool.
Currently, it is a clumsy tool. But it will get better and artists are asking themselves what it will be like when AI can flawlessly mimic our artistry.
Well, I for one will feel sad. Writing has been an essential part of who I am and to know that a computer can be as good as me does feel like a loss. But, I remind myself that when that time comes, AI will even then not be the writer I am because it can never actually be me. Most people don’t want to read what a computer thinks an artist thinks, they want to read what an artist actually thinks, because that is what art is.
Art is the human soul channeling something larger than itself to share with other human souls. AI can be a tool to support that, but it can never actually be that, no matter how good it gets.
The Future
I’ve written before about the dehumanizing aspects of modern technocracy, especially when it converges with the progressive impulse to erase all limits, boundaries, and roots in the name of “liberation.” I’ve written about the need for a robust moral imagination to counter the Machine.
This doesn’t contradict my openness to new tools like AI, it refines it. I’m not interested in technology for its own sake or for its supposed ability to free us from all constraints. I’m interested in it because of its potential to be directed toward human flourishing, meaning, and beauty. Just as technology has been used to dissolve order, it can be used to restore it.
Humans make tools, it is what our species has done since the dawn of time.
Not every tech advance is inherently good, but we should have the debate with nuance. When we overstate the idea that technology is never neutral (as if every tool forcibly converts its user to its own ideological framework) we risk obscuring human agency, disguising bad actors, and pretending we’re powerless. But we are the toolmakers and we can oppose technocracy without opposing technology.
And, ultimately, at the end of the day, when I tried to be scared of AI’s impact on art, it felt like I was LARPing.
All I had to do was look around at the technology I never want to live without – air-conditioning, the internet, dishwashers, refrigerators, and GPS, to name just a few. I mean, I stream music from satellites that are orbiting the earth miles above my head while ordering books off the internet with the click of a button! I’m no Luddite in any realm of my life, why would I be in art?
We humans are the species that looked up at the moon and figured out how to get there. Technology can work for us, not against us, we can decide what we are building toward and why. We can use AI with discernment to serve rootedness, contemplation, imagination, and beauty. Not naive surrender or Luddite rejection, but radical sovereignty.
Drifts wasn’t written to train a machine, but learning that it found its way into an AI dataset somehow didn’t surprise me. The spirit that animated the book was always drawn to the odd, the marginal, the undefinable. It reminds me that once you release your art into the world, it really does drift - into places you can’t predict, to become part of something unexpected that is hurtling into the future in ways none of us can imagine.
Writing on AI that I find interesting:
The Robot Read my Books by Brian Mattson
Why AI Will Not Replace Creativity by Alessandra Bocchi
A Defense of AI Art by Andy Masley
Writers Are Getting AI All Wrong by Anna David
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen
The Fantastic New World of AI Art Generators and Why Their Critics Get It All Wrong by Daniel Jeffries