Can Reading Be Stealing?

If someone takes your book off a shelf in a bookstore without paying for it, that’s theft.

If someone reads your book online without paying for it, ditto. They may not have a physical book in their possession, but they’ve taken hard creative work without paying a dime. And writers cannot live when readers do that.

But if an AI sweeps up your online book and reads it without paying for it, that’s…innovation?

When the AI reads your book and uses it along with many, many others to create new works that nobody needs to pay for because, hey, nobody actually wrote them, that’s…

I don’t now what that is. Nobody does. But I’m worried that it’s the beginning of the end of a world where writers work hard to knit words together to create characters and plots and worlds and visions that we can share.

Stephen King has some thoughts about this too.