Authors want their writing to be read. They like being paid for their work and finding out someone pirated a book or circumvented a paywall isn’t typically the end of the world. But when the reading is done by artificial intelligence, and the pirating is done by a multi-billion-dollar company? Many authors feel differently.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, pirated millions of books to build the dataset that would train its AI model, according to The Atlantic. The “Llama 3” model was trained on stolen text of poetry, sociology, fiction, theology, and more in the Library Genesis, or LibGen, database. The Atlantic created a searchable database of all the authors whose books were used for this new AI model.
Sojourners spoke to numerous authors whose books were included in the theft, according to the database. Authors were asked how they felt about piracy overall, how they reacted to the news that Meta trained its AI on their work, and what Meta and Llama 3 might have learned had they actually read and internalized the material.
In response, some expressed their frustration not at piracy in and of itself, but at their work being stolen by billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, chairman, and chief executive. Others, frustrated at the theft, expressed how inhuman it felt to have so little opportunity to engage with those stealing their work.
Jason “Propaganda” Petty, a poet whose book Terraform: Building a Better World was included in the database of pirated books, said that he wasn’t surprised AI was being trained on his work. He’d already given his publisher permission to sell the work to companies training AI models — “I just knew: Either I’d give permission for payment, or someone will steal it and do it anyway.”
Pointing out that many AI models perpetuate racist stereotypes, Petty said, “At the very least, I know I gave it some blackness.”
Petty wasn’t the only author who turned to humor to process. But alongside that humor, authors expressed their concerns for equality, environmental justice, human connection, and more.
Below are other responses from authors whose work were included in the pirated database:
Jason Kirk
“As a child of LimeWire, I’m delighted to know my book has been pirated by humans. My novel includes a couple scenes in which church kids realize how consistently the Bible condemns wealth, so on the bright side, I’m amused by having passed that wisdom along to Mark Zuckerberg.” — Jason Kirk, author of Hell Is a World Without You
Alessandra Harris
“My first reaction was anger. I’ve had to combat pirated sites stealing my books in the past. But I felt even more incredulous that Meta may be using my stolen books to train its AI with no compensation for the authors.
My three novels that were listed are all set in Silicon Valley (ironically where Meta’s headquarters are located). However, my books explore the reality of mainly Black characters living with huge income disparities and trying to survive with often the odds stacked against them. I explore diverse topics across my books like marriage, mental illness, life after incarceration, climate change through a human perspective, which hopefully allows readers to empathize with the characters and have more empathy for people trying to make it in an unjust world.
Meta would fairly compensate authors to use their work if they read my work. They would understand the struggle that the majority of Americans, and especially people in Silicon Valley outside of the tech world, face just to make ends meet. I was born and raised in Santa Clara County before companies like Meta were even created. Yet, these companies and specifically AI threaten the existence of our livelihoods.” — Alessandra Harris, author of several fiction books including Last Place Seen
Kaya Oakes
“When I learned about the theft, honestly, I had to laugh, because I wasn’t plagiarized by ChatGPT, so it just felt like a matter of time before someone else got around to it. When ChatGPT was plagiarizing books, people went around on social media talking about how their work was stolen and mine wasn’t, so I was kind of embarrassed that I wasn’t a big enough deal for ChatGPT. But now it’s my time! Meta jacked my work, so I get to be part of the memes at last.
More seriously, it’s deeply frustrating, because it is so hard to produce books and we make so very little money from them, and these bazillionaire-owned companies just take our work like they’re owed it. It will be a useful lesson in class to show my writing students that if my work can be plagiarized by AI, their work can also be plagiarized.
Meta scraped my book about the pressures women feel to conform along with a few articles; I just finished reading Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir about working for Facebook. In it, she reveals that former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg was an absolute monster to her female employees even while Sandberg was espousing girl boss feminist messaging. So, I wish Sheryl Sandberg had read my book and had realized this kind of feminism is just shallow capitalism in high heels. It’s not too late, Sheryl! Save your soul!” — Kaya Oakes, author of several books, including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In-Betweens to Remake the World
Kevin Nye
“I first saw it when an author who I would consider a peer posted that their book was in the database. As a newer author with a smaller niche, I guess I assumed that this was something that only happened with ‘bigger’ books and more ‘famous’ authors. Once that surprise wore off, I found myself just frustrated. This shouldn’t be okay, and yet it is allowed to be. It’s a reminder of how much laws and ‘fairness’ privilege those with power. I joked on Facebook that if I tried to profit off an image of Mickey Mouse giving Mark Zuckerberg the middle finger, I would get a cease and desist immediately, but somehow Meta can profit off my work with no repercussions?
Inherent in my work and writing about homelessness are these power dynamics: Laws against loitering, shopping carts, trespassing, jaywalking, etc. always get unequally enforced against people experiencing homelessness. For me, this was just a stark reminder of these dynamics. Even as someone with a lot of privilege myself, my work can be exploited when there are people with as much power and money as Mark Zuckerberg in the world.” — Kevin Nye, author of Grace Can Lead Us Home: A Christian Call to End Homelessness
Terry J. Stokes
“I value meaningful individual engagement with my work much more than revenue or profits, but I’m against exploitative measures taken by large corporations for the sake of developing products and services that further enrich them. Frankly, I was already in favor of abolishing Meta, similar companies, and all of capitalism before this; this is one more straw despite the camel’s back having been broken a good while ago. But this is certainly in keeping with the sentiments I already had towards them.
As a post-scarcity anarchist, I believe that tools like AI can be crucial in accomplishing the abolition of toil, scarcity, money, and a market economy. It’s so sad to see the very present means of liberation being developed and characterized under capitalism. It’s things like AI that make it so obvious, if looked at through the right lens, that we don’t need to live by gaining at others’ expense. There are more than enough resources, including artificial intelligence, for everyone to live fully liberated and abundant lives! So, abolish Meta, not AI!” — Terry J. Stokes, author of two books, including Prayers for the People: Things We Didn’t Know We Could Say to God
Traci C. West
“I’m disappointed. This theft of my work furthers the cultural erosion of the importance of consent by digitally standardizing the insidious idea: It’s fine to take what you want from someone without asking when satisfying your own needs and purposes. It undermines my disruptive Black feminist Christian ethics aimed at the cultural transformations needed to end all forms of gender violence ranging from rape in heterosexual marriages to the targeting of Black and brown transgender members of our communities for harassment and assault.” — Traci C. West, author of several books, including Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics
Phil Christman
“I already knew that my book was on LibGen, as it happens, because a student told me that that was where he had downloaded and read it. I was flattered and appalled at the same time.
The thing is, I can talk to that student about my intellectual property, rights, or the fact that if he just emailed me, I would have lent the thing to him, or that we already have libraries, etc. I can’t have that conversation with these anti-human Silicon Valley idiots.
So, it’ll have to be through lawsuits, organizing, or perhaps violence (though this would be unfortunate) that intellectual priority rights holders assert ourselves against these clowns.
If ‘artificial intelligence’ were actually a thing, then I could hope that my book would saddle this new computer consciousness with all of my insecurities, self-doubts, hesitations, demurrals, and neuroses. Since there is no chance that artificial general intelligence will ever actually happen, I don’t even have this to look forward to.
But frankly, I think that there is about the same chance that Mark Zuckerberg will ever learn anything from any book again, let alone mine. Whatever spark of creativity that guy ever had, he long ago snuffed out in the process of trying to make algorithms be creative for us.” — Phil Christman, author of several books including How To Be Normal
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