Esquire | E Schmidt
“I get hung up on the word scraping,” author R.O. Kwon says. “It sounds quite violent.” Last September, when Kwon learned that her first novel, The Incendiaries, was part of the Books3 dataset that some generative AI models were trained on at the time, she felt violated. She and other authors took to social media, lobbing anger, hurt, and frustration at the tech companies that had secretly “scraped” the Internet for data without consent from or compensation for creators.