Researchers at Google Brain are having their artificial intelligence read 11,000 novels to improve its sense of language.  At least one author thinks that a weird idea and wonders why she wasn’t asked for her permission before her book was used. The books used were supposedly unpublished and free for download. Should a company like Google be expected to pay for the books its machine reads, or does it matter since the books were all available as free downloads?

Another question we might ask is whether reading all these books will help Google drive better.  It’s language translation skills are definitely improving.