In 2004, when I decided to share my story of overcoming abandonment and loss, it became imperative to learn the craft of writing fiction. With limited funds and a crazy work schedule at a large department store in West Hollywood, I opted for a correspondence course. Through an ad in a magazine, I found the Stratford Career Institute (Vermont, USA). Their Creative Writing Course guided me from crafting my first scene of up to 500 words to finding my voice in a 3000-word short story. Working at my own pace, I completed their writing course within two years. On the left in the captioned photo, the five books on the “Elements of Fiction Writing,” all published by Writer’s Digest Books (Ohio, USA), comprised the reading materials for their course study.

After obtaining my Creative Writing Diploma from the Stratford Career Institute in February 2006, I spent four years writing short stories to develop my craft. At the same time, I began working on my writing project: research for the historical setting, the plot, and character development. I completed the first manuscript of Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel in 2012. Several revisions followed over subsequent years. Believing in the value of my book, despite several rejections from literary agents and publishers, I finally self-published my novel with Lulu Press in 2019.

After years of developing and honing our writing craft, writers are now being ripped off by AI. Without consent from authors or publishers, generative artificial intelligence (GAI) companies have been illegally using copyrighted materials to develop and train their large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots like ChatGPT. Worse still, writers receive no compensation for the copycat books, mimicking or incorporating an author’s work, generated by these LLMs.

On experimenting with ChatGPT, 58-year-old Hollywood screenwriter John Rogers, co-creator of the world of the TV drama series “Leverage,” discovered that 77 episodes of the series—five years’ worth of work—had been used to fuel AI. Also included in the LLMs database were other scripts from shows he was involved with, including “Transformers” and the series “The Librarians.”

“I’m angry at the absolute arrogance of these companies,” Rogers told Wendy Lee of the Los Angeles Times. “These companies have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars of value that would not exist if not for our work.”

Despite screenwriters’ complaints, no major film studio has filed a lawsuit against the big AI companies.

“The studios own the copyrights to our material that’s being stolen, so they have grounds for legal action,” Meredith Stiehm, president of the Writers Guild of America West (WGA West), said in an interview. “Frankly, they’ve been negligent. They have not protested the theft of this copyrighted material by the AI companies, and it’s a capitulation on their part to still be on the sidelines.”

Not surprisingly, the tech companies contacted by the Los Angeles Times saw no problem in appropriating copyrighted material to train their AI models. When contacted, among other AI companies, OpenAI responded in a statement:

“We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents. We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness.”

While the film studios are reluctant to litigate, several groups of authors filed proposed class-action lawsuits in 2024 over the use of their text in AI training. As reported in Reuters, these authors include John Grisham and “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin.

The Authors Guild (AG), America’s oldest and largest professional organization for published writers, has also joined the legal battle again AI companies on all fronts. These actions include: litigation, lobbying for amendments to the copyright law, development of a “Human Authored” certification for human-written texts, and recommended clauses for authors’ book contracts to prevent publishers from using AI or licensing books for AI without permission. Read AG’s guidelines “AI Licensing: What Authors Should Know” for more details.

As a relatively unknown indie-author—who is not eligible for AG membership, due to income requirement—how will I know if the generative AI companies are stealing my published work? U.S. Senator Adam Schiff from California has the answer. On April 9, 2024, he proposed the “Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024” that requires these companies to disclose their use of copyrighted work to the Registrar of Copyrights “not later than 30 days before the generative AI system with respect to which the training dataset is used is made available to consumers…” This bill would be great for writers, if approved.

Here in California, on September 28, 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom approved a similar bill, named “AB-2013 Generative artificial intelligence: training data transparency.” This bill gives generative AI companies until January 1, 2026, to make available to Californians the database used to develop their LLM system or service, “regardless of whether the terms of that use include compensation, a developer of the system or service to post on the developer’s internet website documentation, as specified…”

Three months earlier, on June 26th, in response to the outcry for AI database transparency, a group of seven pioneering companies launched the Dataset Providers Alliance (DPA). Representing a diverse range of content sectors in music, image, text, video, and voice, the founding members share the commitment “to promoting the responsible and ethical licensing of intellectual property content for AI and ML (machine learning) datasets. The alliance aims to foster collaboration, develop best practices, and advocate for the rights of content creators in the rapidly evolving AI and ML landscape.”  You can learn more at the DPA link provided.

With regards to “text content,” Authors Guild is listed on the DPA website as endorsing Created by Humans, a groundbreaking AI Rights licensing platform that connects authors with AI developers for the licensing of copyrighted works for AI training and development. In my view, only time and author usage will reveal the efficacy of this platform.

In their latest report “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2: Copyrightability,” released on January 29, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office, housed in the Library of Congress, “affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.”

As part of an AI Opportunities Action Plan, released on January 13, 2025, to turbocharge generative AI development and adoption in Britain, the Secretary of State Science, Innovation and Technology by Command of His Majesty has proposed a novel solution for addressing the copyright controversy. Proposal 13 calls to “Establish a copyright-cleared British media asset training data set, which can be licensed internationally at scale. This could be done through partnering with bodies that hold valuable cultural data like the National Archives, Natural History Museum, British Library and the BBC to develop a commercial proposition for sharing their data to advance AI.” Proposal 24 reiterates that “the current uncertainty around intellectual property (IP) is hindering innovation and undermining our broader ambitions for AI, as well as the growth of our creative industries. This has gone on too long and needs to be urgently resolved…”

What a gift to the generative AI companies! What a kick in the butt for published writers! We spend years honing our craft, while they reap the profits.

For interested British writers, you can learn more about the government’s “Open Consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence,” published on December 17, 2024, and the concerns raised by the British creative community. The Open Consultation for UK citizens will be live until Tuesday, February 25, 2025.

Will the British copyright-cleared proposals become law? If so, would the United States follow suit? Until then, I see no cause for concern. I’m not a successful Hollywood screenwriter like John Rogers. It’s unlikely that an AI company would adapt one of my novels for the silver screen—without my permission and without compensation. But in our crazy new world where tech giants have risen to high places, the strangest things can happen.