Meta Took My Books
Yesterday, I typed my name into a database. Not Amazon. Not Goodreads. A new one I’d seen floating around social media. It was a tool launched by The Atlantic, allowing authors to search a leaked dataset connected to the now-infamous LibGen archive. I hesitated, not really expecting much. Then I saw it. Every book I’ve written. Every title I’ve poured months and years of my life into, was sitting there in that dataset.
Free. Pirated. Used without my consent.
Piracy
As an author, I’ve dealt with piracy before. I take a small comfort knowing that people who download my books from pirate websites may end up with a virus on their computer. It beggars belief just how underutilised libraries are – legitimate places where you can borrow or listen to a book for free and the author gets a few pence in return. Piracy is a sad and frustrating reality of publishing in the digital age. But this is different. This isn’t just about loss of income. This dataset was reportedly used by tech giant Meta to train its artificial intelligence models.
The Atlantic states that court documents show that staff at Meta discussed licensing books and research papers lawfully but instead they chose to use stolen work because it was faster and cheaper. Meta Platforms, Inc, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has a market worth of £1.147 trillion. They know how business works, yet copyright appears to mean nothing to them. Is this a David and Goliath situation? Do creative works mean so little to these people that they stomp all over our rights?
It’s worth saying again:
According to reports from The Atlantic, Reuters, and Wired, Meta trained its AI on a dataset of pirated books and scientific papers pulled from LibGen.
Compensation
For context, LibGen—short for Library Genesis—has long been known for hosting pirated material. It’s a grey zone of the internet that many have used, but few talk about openly. Now, internal Meta documents from an ongoing lawsuit have revealed that LibGen was among the sources used to build LLaMA 3, Meta’s large language model. And yes, court documents suggest senior executives—including Mark Zuckerberg—were aware of the origin of this material.
I’m not here to speculate on their intentions. I’m here because my work—my intellectual property—was part of that dataset. I didn’t give permission. No one asked. No one paid. Yet, my books were scraped, ingested, and potentially used to help train a model that now powers chatbots and AI tools used around the world.
I’m not anti-AI and I understand that it needs data to learn. But shouldn’t that data be obtained ethically? With consent? With compensation? As it stands, it feels like the rules don’t apply when it comes to big tech. What’s worse is the sense of helplessness. There is no takedown form. No clear path to remove our work. Meta has billions in resources. This is my life’s work. I’m one author. Little old me. And yet, I’m far from alone.
Legal Action
Authors and publishers are already pursuing legal action. Whether the courts rule in their favour remains to be seen. But as writers, we’re used to fighting for our work.
If you’re an author, I urge you to check if your work appears in the dataset: Search the LibGen Tool
See this article by the Society of Authors about what action you can take.
If you’re a reader, know this: we love what we do. We’ll keep writing. But in this changing landscape, your support matters more than ever. Buy the book. Leave the review. Recommend it to a friend.
Authors and AI
I’m trying to be pragmatic. AI is here. That’s not going to change. As a teccy geek myself, I’m in total awe of it. I speak to it all the time. It’s provided me with a fitness programme, weight training advice, gluten-free recipes and more. It even helped me to build my WordPress site from scratch.
I’ve been writing for over ten years now. In the last decade, I’ve seen so much change. The advent of kindle books changed the publishing immeasurably. Then came subscription services such as Kindle Unlimited where readers can download books for free. Spotify are following suit. BookTok and other social media platforms are having a big impact on books, too. The one piece of advice I always give to writers is to just keep going. If you want to make a living from writing then treat it like a business. Stay keen. Keep learning. Keep one step ahead. There will always be a demand for stories written by humans, with real insights and emotions, not just words that have been copied and pasted onto the page. See my previous blog for details on this. Perspective is everything in this business. Keep positive. As technology changes, use it to your advantage while remaining true to yourself.
What do you think? I’d love to know your thoughts. Drop a comment below and let’s chat. Writers love a good discussion, after all.
