This Monday morning, numerous writers learned that their books had been uploaded and scanned into a massive dataset without their consent called Prosecraft.io, a site that used novels to help power a data-driven project to display word count, passive voice, and other much more subjective, writing-style markers such as vividness. 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. Young Adult authors 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 the online backlash, Prosecraft creator Benji Smith took down the website, which had existed since 2017.

Smith wrote, “I’ve spent thousands of hours working on this project, cleaning up and annotating text, organizing and tweaking things,”. “But in the meantime, ‘AI’ became a thing. And the arrival of AI on the scene has been tainted by early use-cases that allow anyone to create zero-effort impersonations of artists, cutting those creators out of their own creative process.”

Smith’s Prosecraft was not a generative AI tool, but authors worried it could become one, since he had accumulated a dataset of a quarter billion words from published books, which he found by crawling the internet.

Prosecraft would show several paragraphs from a book, one that was “most passive” and one that was “most vivid.” the books were then placed into percentile rankings based on how vivid, how long or how passive it was.

Smith did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but he elaborated on his intentions in his blog post.

“Since I was only publishing summary statistics, and small snippets from the text of those books, I believed I was honoring the spirit of the Fair Use doctrine, which doesn’t require the consent of the original author,” Smith wrote. However, the authors noted that the excerpts of their books on Prosecraft included major spoilers, causing further frustration.

Athough Smith apologized, authors remain enraged. For artists and writers, the recent proliferation of AI tools has created a deeply frustrating game of whack-a-mole. As soon as they opt out of one database, they find that their work has been used to train another AI model, etc. 

 Generative AI and the technology behind self-publishing have created a perfect storm for scammy activities. Amazon has been bombarded with low-quality, AI-generated travel guides, and even AI-generated children’s books. But tools like ChatGPT are trained on the total of the internet, so this means that real travel writers or children’s book authors could be getting inadvertently plagiarized.