My Books Were Used to Train Meta’s Generative AI. Good.
When The Atlantic revealed last month that tens of thousands of books published in the past 20 years had been used without permission to train Meta’s AI language model, well-known authors were outraged, calling it a “smoking gun” for mega-corporate misbehavior. Now that the magazine has put out a searchable database of affected books, the outrage is redoubled: “I would never have consented for Meta to train AI on any of my books, let alone five of them,” wrote the novelist Lauren Groff. “Hyperventilating.” The original Atlantic story gestured at this sense of violation and affront: “The future promised by AI is written with stolen words,” it said.
I understand that the database in question, called “Books3,” appears to have been assembled from torrented ebooks ripped into text files, in which case any use, Zadie Smith, Michael Pollan, and others who command huge speaking fees and lucrative secondary-rights deals. Maybe I’d better understand the writers’ angst, I thought, if my work, too, was being pirated and sourced for AI power.
