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    Michael Hiltzik: This AI chatbot was 'trained' using my books, but don't blame me for its incredible stupidity

    by Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times Oct 06, 2023 6 minutes
    Chatbot developers "train" their systems by infusing them with the trillions of words and phrases present on the internet or in specialized databases; when a chatbot answers your question, it's summoning up a probabilistic string of those inputs to produce something bearing a resemblance— often a surprising resemblance— to what a human might produce.

    I've just discovered that I am part of the AI chat revolution. Please don't hate me.

    My role is as the author of three of the nearly 200,000 books being pumped into the electronic brain of LLaMa, the chatbot developed and distributed by Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook), in competition with the better-known ChatGPT bots marketed by OpenAI.

    Alex Reisner of the Atlantic compiled a handy search tool for the database, which is known as Books3, giving authors the world over an opportunity to hunt for their names and decide how to think about the results.

    I haven't quite decided for myself — on the one hand, I'm a bit peeved that only three of my seven books have been putatively used to "train" LLaMa; on the other, I'm given to pondering what my contribution should be worth, and why shouldn't I get paid for it?

    The reactions of others authors, prominent and not so prominent, have been all over the map. Some have expressed convincing outrage. They include the novelists John Grisham,, and Sarah Silverman, a plaintiff in a similar lawsuit against .

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