The Machines Read My Books Without Asking, and I Refuse to Call It Theft

Twenty-two. That is how many of my papers and books turn up in the database of texts absorbed into the training of large language models. I typed my name into the search box the way one checks a symptom online, half dreading the result and half hoping for it. There they were. Chapters I labored over, an article I still argue with in my head, a book that sold mostly to libraries. All of it taken up by a machine that never asked and never sent a note of thanks.

Some of my friends are furious. The word going around is stolen. Colleagues who never once complained that a rival failed to cite them now discuss intellectual property with real heat. I understand the feeling. There is something deflating about learning that your life's work was handled as raw material.

Still, I cannot summon the outrage, and every attempt runs into a wall I built myself.

Here is the wall. What did I do at twenty-five? I read. I read Buber and Bakhtin and Dewey and a few hundred others, hungrily and not always carefully, and then I wrote things shot through with their sentences and their instincts. I compensated none of them for the structures I absorbed, the metaphors I later recycled without noticing, the moves I learned to make in an argument because I had watched someone else make them first. That is not a confession. That is a description of how anyone learns to write.

Scholars are also the last people who should complain about being read too widely. We spend careers hoping for readers. We check citation counts with an eagerness that would embarrass a teenager. We give talks to eleven people and count it a good day if two take notes. The whole economy of academic life runs on the hope of influence, and influence means exactly this: your ideas get loose, travel without you, and surface in the thinking of people you will never meet. A model that has read twenty-two of my texts and can explain my position on relational pedagogy to a student in Jakarta is not robbing me. It is doing the thing I wanted done.

The objection worth taking seriously concerns credit. When the machine reproduces a distinction I spent years sharpening, no footnote appears, no one learns my name, and I lose the only currency my profession pays in.

That objection is real and weaker than it looks. Humans do not cite every word combination either. As Bakhtin put it, every word is half somebody else's. We cite what we take to be original thoughts, and we do it roughly, late, and often wrongly. Nobody footnotes the phrase "on the other hand." Nobody credits the scholar from whom they learned to build a counterargument. The bibliography is a courtesy extended to a thin top layer of novelty. Underneath sits a large unattributed commons of phrasing and habit that every writer draws on and no writer acknowledges. The machines are working that same commons, only faster, and in public, where the process becomes visible.

Honesty requires a note about my position. Academic royalties are a rounding error. A novelist whose living depends on sales has a genuine grievance, and I will not lecture her about free circulation while a company monetizes her plot. Her case is not mine. Mine is the case of someone who was already giving the work away and now finds it picked up by a courier he did not hire.

I could get angry. To do that I would have to abandon a belief I have held since I was young and reading library copies: that knowledge belongs to whoever needs it, and that ownership sits awkwardly on top of ideas. Dropping that belief now, at the moment it became inconvenient to my vanity, seems like poor timing. Principles that apply only when they cost nothing are not principles. They are preferences.

So the training sets can keep my twenty-two. Read the books, or ask a chatbot what is in them. Buy them, borrow them, or absorb them secondhand from a model that swallowed them whole. I would prefer the first option, and my publisher would prefer it more. But the thing I actually wanted was for the ideas to get somewhere and change a mind or two along the way.

They are getting somewhere. I did not choose the vehicle.