Millions of books have been uploaded to LibGen, an illegal pirate site that is said to have been accessed by tech giants including Meta and OpenAI.
New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi O Aotearoa president Dr Vanda Symon said a newly released search tool from United States magazine The Atlantic indicated more than 7.5 million books could be involved, though it remained unclear whether all of those works were directly downloaded by AI companies.
Thousands of books by New Zealand writers were included in the latest theft of intellectual property by "Big Tech".
Local writers, who earned on average about $16,000 a year from their work, had now been deprived of potential revenue.
"Big Tech can afford to pay licence fees to authors and publishers to legally use the content they need to train their AI language models."
Meta and other AI companies knew exactly what they were doing, but it seemed they would rather steal that content than ask and pay for the use of it, Dr Symon said.
Those companies could have paid for licences but had instead relied on pirated texts.
The society was collating a list of all New Zealand books affected by the latest instance of mass piracy.
Around the globe, copyright law was being reviewed and updated to tackle AI development and intellectual property rights.
In New Zealand, the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment was planning to progress formal consultation in 2025 with creative industries and the public on copyright legislation, including AI, something that was "demonstrably urgent".
New Zealand Society of Authors chief executive Jenny Nagle said it strongly condemned the appropriation of New Zealand authors’ intellectual property.
"This unauthorised use is intellectual property theft by Big Tech that infringes existing legislation.
"The imbalance of power between individual authors defending their property rights versus Big Tech money and might is alarming."
The unsanctioned use of work was legally indefensible and amoral, she said.
"For the creative industries of Aotearoa to thrive we need robust copyright law, protections and enforcement mechanisms, and appropriate penalties for infringement."
The society encouraged writers to use The Atlantic’s online search tool to check if their titles had been included.
Some advice it had for writers was to send a letter to Meta and other AI companies stating they did not have the right to use their books, add a "no AI training" notice on the copyright page of works and certify human authorship in publications.
