Authors make money through sales of their work. This tool was a writing aid that analyzed text and included some copyrighted works in its dataset. There was no way of retrieving these books in full, and the excerpts that were allegedly shown to the users were used in an analytical context, unlike the original works. So, this website couldn't replace ownership of the actual book for readers, and had no capacity to hurt their sales. Basically, the way the service used this data should be transformative enough as to not have any impact on the authors.
> how are the authors "fearing without reason" or "illogically fearing" ?
I called it "fear" because there was no strong argument on the authors' side as to why this tool is bad. I called it "illogical" because I think that it's no coincidence that this controversy only came up now, in 2023. Back in 2017 and onward, the existence of this tool didn't appear to generate pushback. My pet theory is that in 2023, now that we have good generative AI, the advancements have spawned an entire subset of people that view anything "AI" as inherently tainted and immoral. The original complaints seem to lack understanding of this tool and multiple people have conflated it with generative AI, despite it having nothing to do with that.