On Monday morning, numerous writers woke up to learn that their books had been uploaded and scanned into a massive dataset without their consent. A project of cloud word processor Shaxpir, Prosecraft compiled over 27,000 books, comparing, ranking and analyzing them based on the “vividness” of their language. Many authors — including Young Adult powerhouse Maureen Johnson and “Little Fires Everywhere” author Celeste Ng — spoke out against Prosecraft for training a model on their books without consent. Even books published less than a month ago had already been uploaded.
After a day full of righteous online backlash, Prosecraft creator Benji Smith took down the website, which had existed since 2017.
“I’ve spent thousands of hours working on this project, cleaning up and annotating text, organizing and tweaking things,” Smith wrote. “But in the meantime, ‘AI’ became a thing. And the arrival of AI on the scene has been tainted by early use-cases that a …
