Author Alert: Has Your Work Been Used To Train Meta’s AI?
From The Australian Society of Authors:
Today The Atlantic published a search tool allowing authors to search for their books in the LibGen dataset, which has been used to train Meta’s AI system. The ASA is horrified to see that Australian authors’ books have been included in this pirate database.
(By the way, this was posted on the ASA’s Meta-owned Instagram account.)
From the US Authors Guild:
Meta and other AI companies knew exactly what they were doing but they did it anyway. Why? Because they needed books for their quality writing, style, expression, and long-form narration and would rather steal them than ask and pay for them as they do for all of the other necessary components of their AI, such as electricity and programming.
From the UK Society of Authors:
The Atlantic says that court documents show that staff at Meta discussed licensing books and research papers lawfully but instead chose to use stolen work because it was faster and cheaper. Given that Meta Platforms, Inc, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has a market capitalisation of £1.147 trillion, this is appalling behaviour.
Six editions of my own books are on the list of pirated books that was used to train Meta’s AI program. As if it isn’t bad enough that my books are constantly pirated, Meta is now taking authors’ work for their own commercial gain, without asking for permission from the authors or paying the authors or publishers.
If you’re an Australian author, you can check if your books are on the pirated LibGen list here and you can inform the ASA about this using this form.
US authors are automatically included in a class action against Meta and you can find out more here. UK authors can find more information here.
Authors, publishers and readers – if you use Facebook, Instagram, Threads or WhatsApp, you’re supporting Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. If the Cambridge Analytica scandal wasn’t enough, Meta also announced in January this year that it would no longer use professional fact checkers on its social media platforms.
