For more than 20 years, Kit Loffstadt has written fan fiction exploring alternate universes for Star Wars heroes and Buffy the Vampire Slayer villains, sharing her stories free online.

But in May, Loffstadt stopped posting her creations after she learned that a data company had copied her stories and fed them into the artificial intelligence technology underlying ChatGPT, the viral chatbot. Dismayed, she hid her writing behind a locked account.

Loffstadt also helped organise an act of rebellion last month against AI systems. Along with dozens of other fan fiction writers, she published a flood of irreverent stories online to overwhelm and confuse the data-collection services that feed writers’ work into AI technology.

“We each have to do whatever we can to show them the output of our creativity is not for machines to harvest as they like,” said Loffstadt, a 42-year-old voice actor from South Yorkshire in Britain.

Fan fiction writers are just one group now staging revolts against AI systems as a fever over the technology has gripped Silicon Valley and the world. In recent months, social media companies such as Reddit and Twitter, news organisations including The New York Times and NBC News, and authors such as Paul Tremblay and the actress Sarah Silverman have all taken a position against AI sucking up their data without permission.

Writers and artists are locking their files to protect their work or are boycotting certain websites that publish AI-generated content, while companies like Reddit want to charge for access to their data. At least 10 lawsuits have been filed this year against AI companies, accusing them of training their systems on artists’ creative work without consent. This past week, Silverman and the authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and others over AI’s use of their work.

At the heart of the rebellions is a new-found understanding that online information — stories, artwork, news articles, message board posts and photos — may have significant untapped value.

The new wave of AI — known as “generative AI” for the text, images and other content it generates — is built atop complex systems such as large language models, which are capable of producing humanlike prose. These models are trained on hoards of all kinds of data so they can answer people’s questions, mimic writing styles or churn out comedy and poetry.

That has set off a hunt by tech companies for even more data to feed their AI systems. Google, Meta and OpenAI have essentially used information from all over the Internet, including large databases of fan fiction, troves of news articles and collections of books, much of which was available free online. In tech industry parlance, this was known as “scraping” the Internet.

OpenAI’s GPT-3, an AI system released in 2020, spans 500 billion “tokens”, each representing parts of words found mostly online.

New York Times News Service