Alex Reisner’s shocking new article at The Atlantic on Meta’s unbelievable brazen piracy operations is must reading:
The book is mostly about a database called Libgen, known to contain pirated material.
Meta chose to use it, apparently knowing that it contained pirated material, to train the LLM Llama 3.
Thanks to a search tool provided by the Atlantic, I discovered tonight that in this one database alone Meta pirated over 100 of my books and scientific articles.
In every single case, they used them without my permission.
§
Many other authors are discovering the same thing; social media is full of reports like mine. (If you are an author, you can check here. If you ever published under different names, such as with and without a middle initial, you will want to check them all.)
§
The most damning thing? It appears that Meta knew exactly what they are doing, and chose to proceed anyway. One of the wealthiest companies in history decided to rip off authors in cold blood, out of pure greed, per reporting at The Atlantic:
Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.
§
It would appear that Mark Zuckerberg himself, the third richest person in the world, worth over 200 billion dollars, signed off on this mass theft of intellectual property.
No word yet, so far as I know, on whether other rapacious AI companies did the same.
Gary Marcus is pissed. He worked hard on every one of those books and articles and does not appreciate them being used without permission by AI systems with an established tendency towards regurgitation.
