“Meta steals books”: serious accusations weigh on the AI of Mark Zuckerberg
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Among the participants who were in front of the London seat of Meta in King's Cross, renowned novelists like Kate Mosse and Tracy Chevalier, and the poet Daljit Nagra, former president of the Royal Society of Literature.
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The people gathered handed over, in hand, a letter from the Society of Authors (SOA) to Meta representatives. The American seat has received the same correspondence.
According to legal proceedings at the start of the year, Mark Zuckerberg would have personally validated the use of Libgen to feed his AIan illegal library with more than 7.5 million works.
The Atlantic published, last month, a database of the works present in Libgen and many authors then discovered that their writings were possibly used illegally by Meta for his AI.
Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin, president of Soa, qualifies the actions of Meta d '“illegal, shocking and totally devastating for writers”. “A book may require a year or more to be written. Meta stole these works so that its AI can reproduce creative content, potentially risking putting these same unemployed authors”she adds.
A Meta spokesperson said: “We respect the intellectual property rights of third parties and believe that our use of information to cause AI models is in accordance with the laws in force.”
Recently, authors including Kate Mosse, Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Val McDermid signed a letter from the SOA addressed to Lisa Nandy, secretary of culture. Their request: that Meta leaders be summoned to Parliament. The declaration was published on Change.org in the form of a petition with more than 7,000 signatures.
“I was horrified to note that my novels were in the Libgen database and I am indignant by the government's silence on this question”says the novelist Aj West, organizer of today's demonstration. “Seeing my beautiful books looted without my authorization and without the slightest financial compensation, then given in pasture to the AI monster, gives me the impression of having been stripped.”
In January, a complaint was filed by authors who pursue Meta for copyright violation in the United States. Among them: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jacqueline Woodson, Andrew Sean Greer, Junot Díaz and humorist Sarah Silverman, who claim that business managers, including Mark Zuckerberg, knew that Libgen contained hacked content when the database was used.
The authors are “legitimately rebellious”according to Anna Ganley, Director General of SOA. “The fact that these online libraries of hacked works continue to exist is already quite serious, but when global companies use them to illegally access the protected works of authors and exploit them is a double damage to writers.”
