Best-selling Scottish author Val McDermid has warned that writers are facing a “massive threat” from artificial intelligence.
She hit out at the scale of the unauthorised use of her work to train AI language models months after it emerged that more half of the UK’s published novelists believe it was likely to end up "entirely replacing" the work of fiction writers.
The crime writer claimed more than 150 pieces of her work had effectively been “stolen” in recent years under the advance of AI.
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Ms McDermid has also raised concerns about the future of the publishing industry and admitted it was “scary” how many jobs were already being “taken over by machines”.
The Fife-born author, who was speaking at an in-conversation event in Edinburgh with former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, suggested publishers were already using AI to help translate books into different languages.
According to research published by Cambridge University, nearly 60 per cent of the UK’s novelists said they knew their work had been used to train AI language models without permission or payment, while more than a third suggested their income had “taken a hit” due to the impact of AI.
Ms McDermid, who was discussing her new novel Silent Bones at the Portobello Bookshop event in Edinburgh, said: “I think AI is a massive threat.
“AI can produce a certain kind of book and it is learning all the time. The only reason it can produce any books at all is because it's stolen out of all of our texts. All of our texts have been scraped.
“They have taken 150 pieces of my work, for which I've had no recompense, they’ve not asked my permission and I have no say in what they do.
“There are court cases on the way now, but it's tip of the iceberg stuff.
“There was never any point when they sought a partnership with creatives. They just stole our work and ripped us off.
“Publishers are already saying they’re not going to use flesh and blood translators when they're doing books a different language, they'll just put it through AI and then get somebody to copy edit it.
“There are lots of jobs in the publishing industry and the wider media industry that are now being taken over by machines. It’s quite scary.”
Ms McDermid, a former newspaper journalist, has sold more than 19 million books around the world since her debut novel, Report for Murder, was published in 1987, with her work translated into more than 40 languages so far.
The author said she was confident that writers would always have a way of writing in a way “that cannot be replicated by a machine.”
She added: “A machine can pretend to have feelings, but it doesn't have feelings and it doesn’t understand emotions at the deep level that we do that.
“Sometimes when you are reading a book and an event happens you expect the characters to behave in a particular way, but they don't.
“They respond in a different way because they are human because they have a range of possibilities.
“I think the human writer will always have a head-start on the machines for that.”
Speaking at the in-conversation event with the writer, Ms Sturgeon suggested Scotland was not doing enough for the arts industry and admitted it was lagging behind Ireland, which has just launched a new dedicated support scheme for artists.
The Scottish Government’s arts agency, Creative Scotland, was targeted for a 10 per cent funding cut while Ms Sturgeon was First Minister and nearly £7mwas only restored to its budget after a furious industry backlash and fears of thousands of job losses.
Sturgeon’s successor, Humza Yousaf, later pledged promised that the government would spend an additional £100m on the arts but this is not expected to delivered until at least 2028.
Although Creative Scotland has been awarded an additional £40m to expand a long-term funding programme, the country’s national performing companies hit out at their “inexplicable” treatment by ministers last month after being hit with an “effective cut” in the Scottish Budget announcement.
Last month the Irish government launched a Basic Income for the Arts initiative which will provide £283 a week to 2000 eligible artists for the next three years.
Ms McDermid said: “Being a writer is not something you do if you want to get rich. The average earnings of full-time authors are something like £5000 a year.
“If you are lucky like me and hit a seam of books that people want to read, buy and enjoy then you can do okay, but the overwhelming majority writers do not make those kind of earnings. It is not a living for most writers.”
Ms Sturgeon said: “That is a sad reflection of what we value and what we don’t value in society. Living in a dark, scary world, arts and culture has become much important than at other times. Do people like me value the arts enough? What more should we, or those that are coming after me, be doing?”.
Ms McDermid suggested the arts industry was under-supported in the UK given how much it generates for the economy. The creative industries are said to be worth £126.6 billion, according to the most recent research.
Ms Sturgeon said: “I definitely think Ireland does it better than we do. I say that as someone who was in power. It is as much a reflection on me as any politician. I think Ireland is a good model to look at and potentially follow.”
The writer revealed that a third series of the hugely-popular ITV adaptation of her Karen Pirie novels, which Lauren Lyle stars in, is being planned. Published in 2014, The Skeleton Road sees an investigation following the discovery of a skeleton at the top of a crumbling building in Edinburgh lead to the mysterious disappearance in the Balkans.
Silent Bones, the latest novel in McDermid's Karen Pirie series, sees the detective and her team investigate cases which appear to be connected to the Scottish independence campaign and a mysterious men-only book club.
The former First Minister said: "Obviously the referendum is a bit in the past.
"Without giving anything away, the book club at the heart of this book which definitely does lift the veil on powerful men who abuse their power, try to network and get influence and advancement, and women and those less powerful just become pawns in their game.
"I can't quite put my finger on what that is making me think about."
McDermid said: "One of the things I tried to do with this book was to write about the effect of that kind of behaviour."
Ms Sturgeon has revealed she is writing a political thriller in which she is planning to take revenge on her "enemies" who she said "got off lightly" in her memoir, Frankly, which was published last year.
Discussing her planned book with Ms McDermid, the former First Minister said: "The problem I've got in writing a political thriller is there are too many people that I would kill. How many murders do you think it is okay to have in one novel?".
The crime writer responded: "It could be like a Scottish Psycho."
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