My Book Was Stolen to Teach AI. Was Yours?

Howdy cookbook fans!

Well, it’s been a big week here at SPN HQ because…. drum roll… Stained Page News won the 2023 IACP Award for best newsletter!!! It was actually a tie and the award is shared with ; check out her newsletter too!

I submitted three pieces to the awards program:

• Sticklers, Improvisers, and “Following” Recipes by me

• Inside a Legendary Designer’s Recipe Sketchbook by

• A Cookbook for Prisoners, by Prisoners by

Go read them! They are good in my opinion. And award-winning!

Okay let’s do cookbook news.

Today's issue of Stained Page News is brought to you by Hardie Grant North America and A New Way to Bake: Re-imagined Recipes for Plant-based Cakes, Bakes and Desserts (October 12, 2023) by Philip Koury, the award-winning pastry chef known for his innovative and delicious creations made from plants. With simple recipes using natural ingredients, Phil transforms classic patisserie into amazing plant-based creations.

Tech Giants Steal Cookbooks to Teach AI How Recipes Work

Last week, the Atlantic published a three-part-series about the Books3 dataset, a collection of nearly 200,000 books (I keep seeing different numbers everywhere) being used by a company called OpenAI to teach AI how to, well, write. The last of this series got the most buzz because you could search the books in the dataset. And it turns out a lot of authors found their work in there. I sure did!

AI is out here learning how to make breakfast tacos and smoke brisket, I guess. Anyway, I was upset that my work is being used without permission or payment—not to mention the fact that my book, The Austin Cookbook, features recipes from restaurants and chefs who are not being compensated, either. I searched for what to do—turns out the Authors Guild is suing, but it’s a class action suit only open to fiction writers. There are other lawsuits pending, of course, and hopefully those can address concerns of nonfiction writers. I started asking around—some folks have discussed the situation with their agents, some with their publishers. But mostly the response was a resounding “THIS SUCKS.”

So. I asked for some thoughts from a couple fellow cookbook authors on how this specifically impacts us, and what they had to say was pretty interesting. For me? It’s one thing for novels to be used to teach AI how writing works, and conversation, and