Meta Stole My Book to Train AI: Here's Why You Should Care
The fight against generative AI is actually a whole lot bigger than just the fight against generative AI.
“A word after a word after a word is power.” –Margaret Atwood.
“Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice.” –Paul Robeson.
Being a writer is, perhaps more often than not, a thankless task. We drive ourselves insane, toiling and fussing over choosing the right words and arranging them in the perfect combinations to convey… well, everything. Everything inside us, and the whole of human experience, collectively. Stories, emotions, experiences, ideas, wisdom. We dissect ourselves, again and again, and go rooting around for morsels we can use to tell authentic stories, in the hopes that it might spark some sense of recognition in others.
But unless you’re one of the elite few, the rewards for being a writer in today’s world generally include low pay, little recognition, and the ever-present agony of battling social media and inexplicable algorithms in order to get a few more sets of eyes on our work.
Now add generative AI and apps like ChatGPT into the mix, and you can also count “zero respect from the general public for the craft of writing” amongst the dubious incentives to entering this particular profession.
And yet, so many of us persist. Why? Because, as has been said by so many writers before, we have no choice. I think I speak for the majority of writers when I say that I write simply because I must, because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself otherwise, or what would happen to me if I stopped (I suspect that I might actually explode, the first true case of spontaneous human combustion). Or, in the words of Joan Didion, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
The motivation isn’t always noble, that’s not what I’m trying to say—so much of writing is self-involved by nature. But the result is the same. Honest writing is a catalyst for human connection.
One of the few actual perks to being a writer is when a reader connects deeply with your work. When they reach out to tell you how much they loved it, how it moved them or meant something to them. How it made them feel less alone. The way it shook their foundation and altered their perspective. How it changed them as a person.
These are the things that GenAI and ChatGPT will never be able to accomplish or take away from me, and as a writer, I hold those things close. I have complete faith that there will never be an AI-generated book of “poetry” emulating my style in a way that is as effective or meaningful as the poems I have written myself, with my own blood, sweat, and tears, through the lens of my hard-earned, unique, lived experience.
But.
That does not diminish the painful and disgusted sense of violation I felt when I discovered my collection of poetry, I Am Not Your Final Girl, was used illegally and without permission or compensation to train Meta’s (Facebook’s) generative AI system.
Like millions of other authors, my book was pirated (in other words, stolen and posted online to be downloaded for free by anyone) and posted on the pirating website LibGen years ago. Though it was upsetting, I didn’t bother to fight it; far more powerful authors than I have tried and failed, and so I knew it would be a waste of time.
On the other hand, I never imagined that my book would later be stolen a second time, in an entirely new and far more disturbing way. Now not only has my work been stolen, but because of Meta AI, my words have been forced into a sausage-making machine that will spit out bastardized approximations of my writing style, my thoughts, my mind.
If you don’t find that alarming, I’m not sure what to say. Except… I feel sorry for you. You must not value your own mind very much.
GenAI is a soulless money-making scheme that steals everything it needs to run directly from artists and writers—but it’s probably stealing from you, too. Other AI companies have already long begun scraping internet websites and social media for data to train their AI systems. If you ever wrote a tweet or made a blog post, there’s a good chance your words have been used without your permission.
And that should make you pretty damn angry, too. These giant corporations are using your thoughts and ideas to make buckets of money, and you’re receiving nothing in return.
And make no mistake: what Meta is doing is illegal. By refusing to pay to license any books to train its AI, the company is hoping to squeak past the courts by claiming “fair use” on all of the 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers it blatantly stole off LibGen. It’s a shocking, offensively bold strategy, but far less surprising when considered in the context of today’s ruthlessly capitalist politics. Numerous lawsuits are already in motion, including one that’s spear-headed by Sarah Silverman and Junot Díaz, along with other authors whose books were stolen by Meta off LibGen.
If artists are the gatekeepers of truth, we need the public to listen to us now more than ever. Generative AI is a bellwether of fascism—one of many we’re seeing right now. Our government is on the verge of disenfranchising millions of women, queer people, and rural people at this very moment, so any attempt to claim we’re not dealing with fascism in the U.S. is naive at best, and that’s only one example of many. And it’s all connected: the disenfranchisement of voters is directly linked to the choke-hold capitalism has on our society, which is directly linked to the bold, large-scale theft of art by corporations, which is directly linked to the immense amount of corporate money that influences politics in the United States.
The rich billionaires currently controlling the government want you complacent. They want you fucking dumb so they can keep doing whatever they want, and nothing dumbs down a population like censorship and an insistence on watered-down, homogenized, meaningless “art” and entertainment.
Rebel, my friends. For you and for all of us. Value art—for the skill, time, and thought that it takes. Respect it. And yes, if you can’t make it yourself (without using AI and stealing from real artists), then pay for it. Eschew the latest environment-butchering AI trend (if I see one more sad and empty imitation of the Studio Ghibli style, I swear to god), and use your goddamn hands to create something instead. Employ your miracle of a brain (that old standby, your built-in thinker, ya know?) instead of ChatGPT. Learn a craft or a skill, pick up a no-expectations hobby. Zines are having a moment right now as people move back to community-based sharing free from internet algorithms and trawling AI programs.
Whatever it is, allow yourself to be bad at it. Let it be messy, let people see the humanity behind it. Struggle is half the beauty of creating. Trust me. Your body, brain, and mental health will all thank you for it dearly.
Let’s not go easily toward the futures that Wall-E and Idiocracy have warned us of so clearly. Take heed. Resist. Your mind is a muscle, it can atrophy. Be a creator rather than a mindless consumer.
And start now, because someday it will be too late.