When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon — nonfiction tomes that he spent “five to six years researching, writing, and investigating” — had been pirated and fed to a chatbot. He says he felt a “cocktail” of emotions: “anger over the brazenness…


