21st century pirates

By Nancy Leasman

We hear so much about artificial intelligence (AI), what it can do, how we may use it, the future of using it, and the dangers therein. I do not use AI in my writing other than as a research tool. Pop-up boxes and icons offer their assistance, which I often take as an affront to my ability. Am I not doing well enough on my own?

After hearing a radio discussion of the future of AI and whether AI is able to be creative or come up with new ideas, I decided to conduct my own experiment.

I started simply enough. I asked AI to tell me a joke about a horse. There was a quick response with appropriate humor. Easy enough for AI to find jokes out there in super media land.

I followed up with asking for a joke about a prominent person. The response was immediate and pretty funny.

AI was not “thinking” or “creating” in coming up with jokes. It was simply searching and finding what was already out there.

I needed to take this line of searching up a level.

I’ve published four books about the Twigger Village I created during the days of COVID isolation. The books are The Elders, The Performers, The Sea Shell Seekers, and The Agate Hunters. All four books are available on Amazon. With that in mind, I asked AI to tell me a story about characters in the Twigger Village.

In less than 10 seconds there was a new Twigger tale at my fingertips! Gina, one of the residents in the Twigger Village, went searching for agates. She found one on the edge of a stream of water. She asked a Twigger friend to help her dig it out. Then the two went on a turtle ride.

It was a simple story. It used two Twigger characters and a basic concept from The Agate Hunters. And it was a new story; one I had NOT written!

I admit I was both impressed and dumbfounded. AI had been creative and had produced a piece that had not existed before that moment.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered HOW it had done that. Though my books are available online, the contents are not open for review or duplication. They exist online as a cover image and description with a sample page.

I went back online and with only a couple of searches I had the answer. My book, Agate Hunters, was for sale as a pdf, a Portable Document Format, from Yumpu. Yumpu is described by TrustRadius, a software review platform, as, “Popular among marketers, publishers, and businesses for distributing digital content without requiring significant technical knowledge.”  Yumpu offers, “PDF to Flipbook Conversion: Instantly turns static PDFs into interactive, page-flipping, HTML5-based digital documents.”

Simply stated, my book had been pirated!

In the old days, we were concerned about plagiarism, defined by Grammarly as, “the act of presenting someone else’s words, ideas, or work as your own, without proper attribution, which is considered academic fraud or theft.”

“A pirated literary work,” defined by Ingramcontent, “is the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or sale of copyrighted material, such as books, e-books, or audiobooks, without permission or compensation to the author or publisher.”

What do you do when your work has been pirated? That was the question I posed to a chatgroup through my book publisher. The answer, which wasn’t at all satisfying, was par for the course in 2026. It happens. Don’t worry about it. Continue to produce good work. Check every two weeks to monitor whether your work is out there under some name other than your own. Really?! Every two weeks with a dozen books?

I learned a copyright lesson when I registered several pieces of my art with the Library of Congress. A copyright protects an original work as soon as it has been created. However, a copyright is as good as you’re willing to back up by hiring attorneys and litigating. If it’s a large infraction with a lot of money at stake, it’s worth it. Otherwise, suck it up buttercup.

And maybe enjoy a small bit of satisfaction that your product was found worthy of being stolen.