A few people have asked my advice on this recently so I’m sharing here in case it’s useful:
- Check if models have been trained on your monographs here.
- If your work has already been used for training, it’s unlikely it will ever be removed from models. Therefore you’re effectively receiving some (inadequate) compensation for the theft of your intellectual property.
- If your work hasn’t been used for training, it’s a case of weighing up the advantages against the disadvantages. Training on your work means you might be more likely to be visible within the model (i.e. more likely to be invoked in response to a prompt about your domain) but this is a deeply unpredictable matter. Conversely it means your work might be diffused in a way that means your intellectual labour is chopped up and repackaged without any link to you.
- So it’s a case of considering how much you value the potential visibility, which I would argue is non-trivial, against how much the potential severing of the link between your ideas and your authorship bothers you.
If it helps, I agonised about this in my role as a literary executor (cared much less about my own work) and reached the conclusion that diffusion of the ideas is best served by being incorporated into training. I wouldn’t expect everyone to reach the same conclusion but I hope it’s useful to make these suggestions about factors to consider.
Mark Carrigan 