For greater than 20 years, Kit Loffstadt has written fan fiction exploring alternate universes for “Star Wars” heroes and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” villains, sharing her tales free on-line.

But in May, Ms. Loffstadt stopped posting her creations after she realized {that a} knowledge firm had copied her tales and fed them into the artificial intelligence technology underlying ChatGPT, the viral chatbot. Dismayed, she hid her writing behind a locked account.

Ms. Loffstadt additionally helped arrange an act of insurrection final month towards A.I. programs. Along with dozens of different fan fiction writers, she printed a flood of irreverent tales on-line to overwhelm and confuse the data-collection providers that feed writers’ work into A.I. know-how.

“We each have to do whatever we can to show them the output of our creativity is not for machines to harvest as they like,” mentioned Ms. Loffstadt, a 42-year-old voice actor from South Yorkshire in Britain.

Fan fiction writers are only one group now staging revolts towards A.I. programs as a fever over the technology has gripped Silicon Valley and the world. In latest months, social media corporations akin to Reddit and Twitter, news organizations together with The New York Times and NBC News, authors akin to Paul Tremblay and the actress Sarah Silverman have all taken a place towards A.I. sucking up their knowledge with out permission.

Their protests have taken completely different varieties. Writers and artists are locking their recordsdata to guard their work or are boycotting sure web sites that publish A.I.-generated content material, whereas corporations like Reddit wish to charge for access to their knowledge. At least 10 lawsuits have been filed this yr towards A.I. corporations, accusing them of coaching their programs on artists’ inventive work with out consent. This previous week, Ms. Silverman and the authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and others over A.I.’s use of their work.

At the guts of the rebellions is a newfound understanding that online information — tales, art work, news articles, message board posts and photographs — might have vital untapped worth.

The new wave of A.I. — generally known as “generative A.I.” for the textual content, pictures and different content material it generates — is constructed atop complicated programs akin to large language models, that are able to producing humanlike prose. These fashions are skilled on hoards of all types of information to allow them to reply folks’s questions, mimic writing types or churn out comedy and poetry.

That has set off a hunt by tech corporations for much more knowledge to feed their A.I. programs. Google, Meta and OpenAI have basically used data from everywhere in the web, together with giant databases of fan fiction, troves of news articles and collections of books, a lot of which was obtainable free on-line. In tech trade parlance, this was generally known as “scraping” the web.

OpenAI’s GPT-3, an A.I. system launched in 2020, spans 500 billion “tokens,” every representing components of phrases discovered principally on-line. Some A.I. fashions span a couple of trillion tokens.

The follow of scraping the web is longstanding and was largely disclosed by the businesses and nonprofit organizations that did it. But it was not effectively understood or seen as particularly problematic by the businesses that owned the information. That modified after ChatGPT debuted in November and the general public realized extra about underlying A.I. fashions that powered the chatbots.

“What’s happening here is a fundamental realignment of the value of data,” mentioned Brandon Duderstadt, the founder and chief government of Nomic, an A.I. firm. “Previously, the thought was that you got value from data by making it open to everyone and running ads. Now, the thought is that you lock your data up, because you can extract much more value when you use it as an input to your A.I.”

The knowledge protests might have little impact in the long term. Deep-pocketed tech giants like Google and Microsoft already sit on mountains of proprietary data and have the assets to license extra. But because the period of easy-to-scrape content material involves an in depth, smaller A.I. upstarts and nonprofits that had hoped to compete with the massive corporations won’t be capable to get hold of sufficient content material to coach their programs.

In a press release, OpenAI mentioned ChatGPT was skilled on “licensed content, publicly available content and content created by human A.I. trainers.” It added, “We respect the rights of creators and authors, and look forward to continuing to work with them to protect their interests.”

Google mentioned in a press release that it was concerned in talks on how publishers may handle their content material sooner or later. “We believe everyone benefits from a vibrant content ecosystem,” the corporate mentioned. Microsoft didn’t reply to a request for remark.

The knowledge revolts erupted final yr after ChatGPT turned a worldwide phenomenon. In November, a gaggle of programmers filed a proposed class action lawsuit towards Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming the businesses had violated their copyright after their code was used to coach an A.I.-powered programming assistant.

In January, Getty Images, which gives inventory photographs and movies, sued Stability A.I., an A.I. firm that creates pictures out of textual content descriptions, claiming the start-up had used copyrighted photographs to coach its programs.

Then in June, Clarkson, a regulation agency in Los Angeles, filed a 151-page proposed class motion go well with towards OpenAI and Microsoft, describing how OpenAI had gathered knowledge from minors and mentioned net scraping violated copyright regulation and constituted “theft.” On Tuesday, the agency filed an identical go well with towards Google.

“The data rebellion that we’re seeing across the country is society’s way of pushing back against this idea that Big Tech is simply entitled to take any and all information from any source whatsoever, and make it their own,” mentioned Ryan Clarkson, the founding father of Clarkson.

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, mentioned the lawsuit’s arguments had been expansive and unlikely to be accepted by the court docket. But the wave of litigation is simply starting, he mentioned, with a “second and third wave” coming that might outline A.I.’s future.

Larger corporations are additionally pushing again towards A.I. scrapers. In April, Reddit said it needed to cost for entry to its software programming interface, or A.P.I., the strategy by way of which third events can obtain and analyze the social community’s huge database of person-to-person conversations.

Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief government, mentioned on the time that his firm didn’t “need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

That similar month, Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer web site for laptop programmers, mentioned it will additionally ask A.I. corporations to pay for knowledge. The web site has practically 60 million questions and solutions. Its transfer was earlier reported by Wired.

News organizations are additionally resisting A.I. programs. In an inner memo about the usage of generative A.I. in June, The Times mentioned A.I. corporations ought to “respect our intellectual property.” A Times spokesman declined to elaborate.

For particular person artists and writers, preventing again towards A.I. programs has meant rethinking the place they publish.

Nicholas Kole, 35, an illustrator in Vancouver, British Columbia, was alarmed by how his distinct artwork type may very well be replicated by an A.I. system and suspected the know-how had scraped his work. He plans to maintain posting his creations to Instagram, Twitter and different social media websites to draw shoppers, however he has stopped publishing on websites like ArtStation that submit A.I.-generated content material alongside human-generated content material.

“It just feels like wanton theft from me and other artists,” Mr. Kole mentioned. “It puts a pit of existential dread in my stomach.”

At Archive of Our Own, a fan fiction database with greater than 11 million tales, writers have more and more pressured the positioning to ban data-scraping and A.I.-generated tales.

In May, when some Twitter accounts shared examples of ChatGPT mimicking the type of in style fan fiction posted on Archive of Our Own, dozens of writers rose up in arms. They blocked their tales and wrote subversive content material to mislead the A.I. scrapers. They additionally pushed Archive of Our Own’s leaders to cease permitting A.I.-generated content material.

Betsy Rosenblatt, who gives authorized recommendation to Archive of Our Own and is a professor at University of Tulsa College of Law, mentioned the positioning had a coverage of “maximum inclusivity” and didn’t wish to be within the place of discerning which tales had been written with A.I.

For Ms. Loffstadt, the fan fiction author, the battle towards A.I. got here as she was writing a narrative about “Horizon Zero Dawn,” a online game the place people battle A.I.-powered robots in a postapocalyptic world. In the sport, she mentioned, a number of the robots had been good and others had been dangerous.

But in the actual world, she mentioned, “thanks to hubris and corporate greed, they are being twisted to do bad things.”