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Meta stole my book to train its AI  but theres a bigger problem

Date:
Thu, 01 May 2025 11:43:42 +0000

Description:
Tech companies are using books to feed AI without consent. But the problem
goes beyond copyright  its about creativity, value, and ownership.

FULL STORY
======================================================================

A shadow library might sound like something from a fantasy novel  but its
real, and far more troubling. 

Its an online archive of pirated books, academic papers, and other peoples
work, taken without permission. These libraries have always been
controversial. But in the AI world, theyre an open secret  rich sources of
high-quality writing used to train large language models. 

The books in them are goldmines because they're long-form, emotional, diverse
and generally well-written. Using them to train AI is a shortcut to teaching
these tools how humans think, feel, and express themselves. But licensing 
them properly would be expensive and messy. So tech companies just didnt
bother. 

This quiet exploitation exploded into public view in March 2025 when The
Atlantic released a tool that lets anyone search for their books in LibGen
(Library Genesis), one of the biggest shadow libraries. 

And there it was, my book Screen Time , along with millions of others. 

It's been revealed in legal documents that Meta, the parent company of
Facebook and Instagram, used LibGen to train its large language models,
including LLaMA 3. Not every title was necessarily used, but the possibility
alone is enough to leave authors reeling. 

As a tech journalist, Ive always tried to stay level-headed about AI  curious
but critical. But when its your book thats been stolen to train AI, it hits
differently. You think about the hours, the edits, the emotion. The despair
and euphoria of creating something from nothing. 

It feels as if all of that has been swallowed whole by a system that mimics
creativity while erasing the creator. The outrage from authors is real  the
lack of consent, the lack of compensation. But what haunts me is something
deeper, a grief for creativity itself, and the sense it's slipping away.

Fair use or foul play?

Meta has been under legal scrutiny about this for some time. In 2023, authors
including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Andrew Sean Greer, and Junot Daz
took legal action against the company , alleging it used their books without
consent to train its large language models. 

Meta's defence has been that training its AI models on copyrighted material
constitutes what's known as fair use. One of the company's arguments is that
the process is transformative, as the AI doesn't reproduce the original works
but instead learns patterns from them to generate new content. 

Laws in the UK and US differ. In the UK, this is generally considered 
unlawful unless it falls under specific exceptions like "fair dealing," which
has a narrower scope than the US's "fair use." In the US, the legality will
hinge on how "fair use" is interpreted, which is currently being tested in
ongoing legal disputes. The outcomes will likely set significant precedents
for future AI copyright law. 

Meta and other AI advocates insist these systems will bring us enormous
benefits. Can't the means justify the ends? Personally, I can appreciate that
argument. But let's not kid ourselves  Meta's primary motivation is profit.
The company is leveraging creative works as raw material to scale its AI
capabilities. 

Writer and author Lauren Bravo, whose books Probably Nothing , Preloved and
What Would the Spice Girls Do? were scraped into LibGen, told me: I feel
furious about my books being on there, for myriad reasons. It's hard enough 
to make a decent living from writing books these days  the average author's
income is 7k!  so to know that a company worth over a trillion dollars felt 
it was reasonable to use our work without throwing us a few quid is so
enraging there aren't even words for it. 

Historian, broadcaster and author Dr Fern Riddell, whose books Death in Ten
Minutes , Sex: Lessons From History and The Victorian Guide to Sex were also
in the LibGen database, said: Its absolutely devastating to see yours  and
many others  lifes work stolen by a billion-dollar company. This is not the
proliferation of ideas. Its straightforward theft to make Meta money. The
scale of it is almost incomprehensible  all my books have been stolen, along
with my right to protect my work. 

Like Bravo and Riddell, other authors are understandably angry and confused
what this means for the future. The Society of Authors and several other
organizations are considering adding to the mounting legal action against
Meta. Maybe change will come  new licensing rules, more transparency, opt-in
models. But it feels too little, too late. 

Writing a book is a long and deeply personal process for any author. But
because mine talks about losing both my parents at a young age  from coping
with grief as a teenager to caring for my mum through cancer  it feels extra
personal, writer and corporate content consultant Rochelle Bugg tells me,
whose book Handle With Care is also in the dataset. I poured my heart and 
soul into my book, so the fact it has been taken, without my knowledge or
consent, and used to train AI models that will generate profit for someone
else seems totally unjust and completely indefensible. 

There's something uniquely painful about deeply personal work being scraped
and repurposed, especially without permission.

The art of being human 

These latest incidents have raised all sorts of questions not just about
copyright, but about creativity  and how little we seem to value it. 

"I fear it's symptomatic of something much larger that's been going on for
decades," Lauren Bravo tells me. "The way creative work has been dramatically
devalued by the internet." 

"We've all participated in it," she adds. "In some ways, the democratization
of content has been brilliant. But the sinister flipside is that we now 
expect to consume creative work for free  writing, music, art, even porn." 

Generative AI tools take that mindset and dial it up to eleven. Why pay for
anything when with a quick prompt you can make it instantly? 

Take the viral AI-generated Studio Ghibli trend . It looks charming until you
remember that Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki has publicly condemned it. Yes, 
AI can gobble up his art and copy its style anyway. But is that kind of
mimicry creativity? Is it still art if it's made without permission, or
without the human experience that shaped it? 

Some of us obsess over these questions. But honestly? It's starting to look
like few others care. Tech companies mine data. Users get the dopamine hit of
jumping on a new trend. Everyone keeps scrolling.

Author Philip Ellis, whose books We Could Be Heroes and Love & Other Scams
were scraped into LibGen, told me: "I see artists online trying to educate
their followers about AI's environmental impact. But as the action figure
trend has shown, your average person is still ignorant  maybe wilfully  of 
how bad generative AI is proving to be. Not just for the climate, but for
culture." 

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), takes an
unsurprisingly optimistic view. In a recent TED 2025 interview, he claimed
generative AI can democratize creativity. 

He acknowledges the ethical complexities  copying styles, lack of consent  
and has floated ideas like opt-in revenue sharing. But even he admits that
attribution, consent, and fair pay are still "big questions." 

OpenAI blocks users from mimicking living artists directly, but broader genre
imitation is still allowed. Altman insists that every leap in creative tech
has led to "better output." But who decides what's "better"? And who 
benefits? 

The danger next is that young creators might see this landscape and wonder if
creating is still worth it. 

"I'm scared that we'll lose a future generation of painters, authors,
musicians," Ellis tells me. "That they won't feel the thrill of discovery. 
The joy of putting hours into a creative pursuit for its own sake. Because
companies like Meta have told them a machine can do the hard part  as if the
hard part isn't the whole point." 

What we lose when we turn to AI to "create" for us isnt just jobs or
royalties. We also lose the messy, magical process that gives art its 
meaning. Creators arent prompt-fed machines. They're emotional, chaotic and
alive. Every poem, novel, song or sketch is shaped by memory, trauma, 
boredom, desire. Thats what we connect to isn't it? Not polish, but meaning
and soul. 

As Ellis told me: "Even if I'm never published again, I'll still carry on
writing. Because the act itself  of crafting characters and worlds that seem
to exist almost independently of me  is what makes me happy." 

AI can certainly produce something that resembles art. Sometimes it's clever.
Sometimes it's even beautiful. But the AI tool you use doesnt feel or care or
know why it exists. Instead, we know it works by interpreting a prompt then
borrowing, blending, remixing and regurgitating. So we have to ask whether
what AI creates is still creativity in the absence of a human creator? 

Its the kind of question that keeps me up at night. And maybe ultimately it 
no longer matters. Maybe the very idea of creativity is being rewritten. Tech
giants certainly promise us bold new forms of expression through AI. And many
people are clearly excited by that prospect. But lets at least be honest,
these systems werent built to nurture our creativity. They were built to
monetize it. 

This isnt just about my book, or even the 7.5 million others in LibGen. Its
about what we choose to value, like art, culture and the wild and weird
richness of human experience. Because the truth is, we're not just training
machines. Were training ourselves to accept a world where our most meaningful
expressions become raw material for someone elses profit. And if were not
careful, well forget what it ever felt like to make something real.

======================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/meta-stole-my-book
-to-train-its-ai-but-theres-a-bigger-problem

$$
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