A website that used AI to analyse thousands of novels has been shut down by its creator, following a massive online backlash from authors.
Prosecraft, a tool “dedicated to the linguistic analysis of literature”, allowed users to look up statistics for individual books, including word count, “vividness”, “passive voice”, and the total number of adverbs. The data was acquired, per a blog from creator Benji Smith, by “crawling the internet”. Per an earlier blog, artificial intelligence algorithms were then used to analyse the data.
As of Tuesday, Prosecraft is no more. On Monday, the site began circulating among authors on Twitter/X, with many expressing concern that their work had been analysed without their permission.
Late Monday, Smith — who also owns Shaxpir, a suite of tools for storytellers that’s similar to Scrivener — posted a blog announcing the closure of Proscraft.
“Today the community of authors has spoken out, and I’m listening. I care about you, and I hear your objections,” he wrote.
“Your feelings are legitimate, and I hope you’ll accept my sincerest apologies. I care about stories. I care about publishing. I care about authors. I never meant to hurt anyone. I only hoped to make something that would be fun and useful and beautiful, for people like me out there struggling to tell their own stories.”
Although the writing community has welcomed the site’s removal, concerns still linger. Chief among them are how the novels were acquired in the first place, and whether or not Smith plans to delete the data collected. And although Smith stresses in his latest blog that Prosecraft wasn’t monetised, his Shaxpir tool — parts of which were developed using Proscraft’s crawled database — does require a paid monthly subscription. Mashable has reached out to Smith with questions, and we will update this article if we receive a response.
The use of AI is currently a major concern among writers. As well as being a key point in the ongoing Hollywood writers strike, it’s also the subject of a lawsuit filed by authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay against OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. The authors say OpenAI trained its model using their work without permission. The lawsuit claims a breach of copyright law.
