FUTURISM ON FACEBOOK, PIRACY, AND AI

From Frank Landymore's 1-10-25 FUTURISM article entitled "Facebook Apparently Trained Its AI by Torrenting Pirated Books Stolen From Authors--and Zuckerberg Personally Approved the Piracy, According to These Documents":

Newly unredacted court documents allege that Meta, formerly Facebook, knowingly used pirated books obtained from the online archive Library Genesis to train its AI models, Wired reports.

Submitted in an ongoing lawsuit filed against the platform by a group of authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and comedian Sarah Silverman, the documents were finally released in full after a judge shot down Meta's attempts to keep portions of them sealed.

The judge argued, per Wired, that Meta fought for the redactions merely to "avoid negative publicity," citing a damning internal quote from one of its employees.

"If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues," the employee wrote.

Library Genesis, or LibGen, is a "shadow library" that provides free access to millions of books, academic articles, and magazines.

That a multibillion-dollar corporation like Meta would tap into its store of pirated content is the latest sign of the impunity that tech companies have operated with to train their large language models, vacuuming up copyrighted content en masse with seemingly no regard for the law — or even the decency, as one of the world's most valuable companies, to buy a single copy of each volume it was using to power its AI.

To read Landymore's entire article, click HERE.