The SoA is organising a day of protest against Meta following revelations of pirated books being used to train their large language models
On Thursday 20 March, The Atlantic broke the story of how Meta has used the Library Genesis (LIbGen) dataset, which is full of pirated material, to develop their AI systems.
The revelations detailed by The Atlantic come against the background of the recent government consultation into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright and the #MakeItFair campaign which sees the UK creative industries fighting back against the proposed changes to copyright law, which would favour multinational tech companies, but irremediably damage the creative industries.
Yeah, that’s another one of the deliberately deceptive talking points being spread.
First of all, average people did this. The dataset Books3 was created by a jobless individual named Shawn Presser using one of Aaron’s scripts. Later he shared it with Meta. What makes the difference for Shawn is that the legal department of Meta stands between him and the copyright industry. As far as I can tell, Shawn is way more average than Aaron in that he doesn’t rub shoulders with the likes of Sam Altman.
It’s interesting how this talking point works. Someone shills for the copyright industry against the interests of the average person. And the justification is that the copyright industry persecuted Aaron Swartz. That doesn’t make sense, does it?