Globe Climate: Lessons from wildfire survivors

In 2023, a new meme began spreading among authors on Instagram. A screenshot of a search box holds an author’s name; below it, there’s a list of book titles. The author is relaying that each displayed title has been used without permission by a tech company to teach a large language model—or LLM—to speak and think. The captions contain expletives, or paragraphs about corporate greed, or AI’s exorbitant water use. The first wave of these posts came in September of that year. The Atlantic scrutinized an AI training data set called Books3, composed of “large, unlabeled blocks of text” and...