British author Cassie Steward has spent many years of her young life writing novels. Her first novel, Number Thirty-Two, although self-published miraculously has given her a modest income allowing her to devote the next four years to writing a follow up novel, Wild Summers. No agent, no publicist, no publishing company supporting her.
Cassie and I are in regular email contact, as she based much of Wild Summers on my memoir/haibun, Eel Pie Island Dharma. Her recent email is frustrating - she has lost half of the royalty stream she depends on to AI manufactured fake books. Cassie is the success story every writer dreams of, earning a living doing the thing you love most. Now AI and it's orc work camps are weakening and trying to destroy her dream. Following is another of Charlie Angus's insightful essays on the nastiness and destructive forces of AI.
If there ever was a sign that the AI tech bubble is about to burst, it was Sam Altman’s hissy fit over the RAM [random access memory] in our home and office computers.
He believes all that RAM would be better served if we gave it to him. Apparently, we’re being selfish, standing in the way of him creating super intelligent AI.
Altman really hasn’t thought this through. He is attacking the very resources his industry feeds on. What would he be able to steal if there weren’t computers on which millions of us do our work and research?
The entire AI business model isn’t just dependent on plundering our environment; it’s also made possible by widespread theft of intellectual property.
Intellectual theft hasn’t gotten much attention when it comes to AI. After all, the tech bros openly muse that their fiddling with artificial intelligence may threaten the future of the human race.
It’s right there in their IPO statements.
In Anthropic AI’s latest public listing, they admit there is a definite possibility of a “catastrophic and existential threat to humanity.”
And they want the RAM from my old MAC to make this happen?
Lol.
My home computer made it possible for me to write ten books. But now I’m learning how the AI giants have used my work to help fraud gangs.
Let me explain.
A few months ago, I was honoured to receive a personal email from the Boston Book Festival. The letter came from Programming Manager Katie Freeman, who was reaching out to tell me how much my recent book, Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, resonated with her.
Katie said she was moved by how I managed to:
“[connect my] own coming-of-age experiences, music and activism with the larger political and economic shifts of the 1980s and create an interesting way into a conversation about how the decisions and movements of that period continue to shape the present.
That combination of personal memory and wider social history feels particularly suited to the kind of reader conversations we try to cultivate through the festival.”
Then Katie brought it home with a personal touch:
“I don’t want to send you a generic promotional pitch or ask you to commit to anything from a first message.”
Wow.
From the Boston Book Festival, this was high praise indeed.
I immediately wrote back, thanked Katie, and said I wanted to participate. But I told her that I was concerned about travel to the United States and whether it was right to break the boycott against US travel.
Katie understood the dilemma. She assured me there was a way of participating through a virtual online “conversation.” In fact, she thought this was even better,
“… as the virtual setting gives us the flexibility to make the session centred on discussion rather than simply a presentation about the book.”
Fantastic.
All she needed from me were photographs and a press kit.
And a $195 set-up fee.
Say what?
I had never heard of a global book festival hitting up authors to “pay to play.”
I was confused.
Over coffee that morning, I explained the strange request to my wife, Brit Griffin.
She laughed and said that she had already had three fake offers to promote her book, The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien. All of those offers had been remarkably detailed and written in a way that showed real understanding of the author and the text.
The offers also included requests for money.
I couldn’t get my head around it.
There was a real Katie Freeman and a real Boston Book Festival. I looked it up. But then, so had the fraudsters.
It was clear that a great deal of carefully curated work had gone in for what seemed like a small return.
But then it dawned on me that this bespoke appeal didn’t come from people who actually read the book. An AI program had hoovered up my book, along with millions of other books.
The AI tech lords have admitted they stole all this work. The $1.5 billion fine they have paid for copyright infringement is chump change to them. They claim the theft was necessary to build AI’s capacity to “understand” the world.
What they were actually doing was enabling fraudsters to use unprecedented computing power to identify authors and break down the themes of their works to create personal letters to sucker them in.
It makes the old Nigerian Princess 419 fax scams seem like con letters chiselled in stone.
Author Joe Dunthorne actually traced one of these book-fraud operations. It led to a centre in the Philippines.
In an article in The Guardian, Dunthorne describes virtual slave labour conditions for the people working the schemes. They had been trafficked and held in virtual prison camps of abuse.
“These scam compounds are a multi-billion-dollar industry, run largely by Chinese crime syndicates who routinely use violence and sexual abuse to keep workers in line. With the enormous sums of stolen money flowing through the industry, some compounds are the size of small towns or, perhaps more accurately, labour camps – with thousands of workers.”
The fraud teams have fake television studios, fake courtrooms, and even deepfake technology to create fake faces for those presenting themselves as lawyers, publishers, or potential wives for lonely bachelors.
When AI talks about the immense energy requirements they require — it isn’t so they can find a cure for cancer, but so this kind of precision fraud can be generated on millions of people — from self-published authors to seniors being promised deals on ocean holidays and lottery wins.
Dunthorne writes that AI’s false world has dangerous real consequences:
“On the other side of the screen, there is someone frightened and far from home, sitting in a sound-insulated booth with a dozen phones splayed out on their desk – while behind them their manager walks by, a taser at his hip.”
So when Digital Minister Evan Solomon or Premier Danielle Smith tries to sell us on the benefits of Canada becoming host to AI data centres for Google, Anthropic or whiny Sam Altman, let’s think of who will be the beneficiaries of this powerhouse technology. And who will pay the price?
As for the real Katie Freeman and the real Boston Book Festival?
Call me. I’m a real human, and I’d love to find a way to participate.
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Thank you for reading Charlie Angus / The Resistance.AI
