Authors and other publishing industry professionals will stage a demonstration outside Meta’s London office today in protest of the organisation’s use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.
Novelists Kate Mosse and Tracy Chevalier as well as poet and former Royal Society of Literature chair Daljit Nagra will be among those in attendance outside the company’s King’s Cross office.
Protesters will meet at Granary Square at 1.30pm and a letter to Meta from the Society of Authors (SoA) will be hand-delivered at 1.45pm. It will also be sent to Meta headquarters in the US.
Earlier this year, a US court filing alleged that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the company’s use of a notorious “shadow library”, LibGen, which contains more than 7.5 million books. Last month, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen, through which many authors discovered their works may have been used to train Meta’s AI models.
SoA chair Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin characterised Meta’s actions as “illegal, shocking, and utterly devastating for writers”.
“A book can take a year or longer to write. Meta has stolen books so that their AI can reproduce creative content, potentially putting these same authors out of business,” she added.
A spokesperson from Meta said: “We respect third-party intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law.”
Credit: theguardian