The Intelligence Heist

An impassioned, fascinating and timely book that tells the story of how the world’s creative work was stolen to power the rise of artificial intelligence

Writers, artists and musicians have been up in arms over the theft of their work to power artificial intelligence - but how did this theft actually occur?

A new history of modern artificial intelligence, packed with stories and interviews, The Intelligence Heist chronicles the rise of AI from a new perspective: the creative work used to train the AI models, and the people behind that work. It explains how and why this work was taken, starting with the books the earliest large language models were built on; the political imperative to side with AI companies over creatives, driven by the accelerating AI race; and the people who fought back, from whistleblowing AI researchers to the struggling artists fighting big tech companies in the courts.

Drawing on the author’s experiences as a leader of the artists and writers’ resistance, The Intelligence Heist exposes the exploitation at the heart of the AI industry, asks whether this is how we want the technologies of the future to be built and argues that all is not lost.