"There are more than 41,000 authors pirated by artificial intelligence in our country."

BarcelonaThe Edita Forum reached its tenth edition with the motto "Reading is increasing." This Wednesday, however, Jorge Corrales, current general director of CEDRO—an organization that fights for copyright in Spain—added a little bit of water to the wine in his opening keynote address. "Generative artificial intelligence represents a digital plundering of the sector's content, the dilution of market value, unfair competition, strains copyright, and represents a loss of innovation," Corrales began his talk at the UPF Barcelona School of Management.

"This is the biggest theft in the history of publishing," warned Enrico Turrin, deputy director of the European Publishers Federation since 2012, on Tuesday. Corrales went on to clarify this incendiary statement: "Artificial intelligence (AI) accesses your protected works: it can do so legally. It takes several stages and requires a large amount of material. AI is dedicated to copying; it is in no way creative." On the internet, there are currently a large number of books hosted in databases (Books1, Books2, The Pile, Common Crawl, etc.) and ghost libraries (Library Genesis, Anna's Archive, Z-Library). "All kinds of ethical and legal boundaries are being crossed with these tools, which may seem democratizing, but that's a lie," says Corrales.

One of the best-known platforms that has fueled the generative artificial intelligence of chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok is the Russian-based LibGen, which hosts "millions of pirated copies of books." It is currently blocked in the United States and several European countries. "Today, and because of all these platforms and libraries, there are more than 41,000 pirated authors in our country from more than a thousand publishers: what has been democratized is not culture, but piracy," Corrales continued. Using this repository of works "to reproduce or create new content" through artificial intelligence is "not fair," but in many countries, for now, there is no legality that can be vigorously challenged. "Currently, the current European regulation regarding AI does not protect copyright and ends up allowing AI to be trained without the consent or compensation of authors," he says.

Piracy will continue to grow.

According to Corrales, since 2016, book piracy in Spain "has not dropped below 30%." With the progressive use of artificial intelligence, this figure "will continue to grow." "Without a clear legal framework regarding AI, there can be no market: there is a lack of information, transparency, and rights are violated," warns Corrales. "Authors' works are being devalued, and demand will shift." The impact of insufficient regulation will lead to "a precariousness of the work of writers, translators, and editors, the concentration of added value in the economic model, and, ultimately, a structural transformation of society, because by weakening copyright, issues such as user privacy are also disregarded." AI, insists the CEO of CEDRO, "distorts the publishing market and redefines the value of works downward." For now, "72% of people using AI are using pre-existing content, especially from educational books and websites," he concluded. Therefore, "these are texts with rights that are violated and previously processed by the publishing industry."