Today UK authors are protesting against Meta for stealing our work to train their AI model. Authors earn an average of £7000 per year, we are not rich, and yet a trillion dollar company decided it didn’t want to license our work fairly as it was “too expensive” Theft is not a valid alternative. - ThreadSky

gregjenner.bsky.social • 8 days ago

Today UK authors are protesting against Meta for stealing our work to train their AI model. Authors earn an average of £7000 per year, we are not rich, and yet a trillion dollar company decided it didn’t want to license our work fairly as it was “too expensive”

Theft is not a valid alternative.

Comments

ourhaus.bsky.social•8 days ago

Agree. Perhaps ithe possibly of a class action could be raised at the event. It would be good to see the major globally successful authors who between them can afford to back a class action come together in solidarity, to support one to at least test the legal waters.

carlydraws.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yes, thieves! And they helped themselves to artists/illustrator's work too. All creatives need to be protesting- and the UK government needs to start protecting our rights instead of selling us out.

trendorabay.bsky.social•8 days ago

alexanderchee.bsky.social•8 days ago

What does the protest involve?

lomelindi12.bsky.social•8 days ago

Absolutely right

melissjpeltier.bsky.social•8 days ago

We need an international class action suit.

magnificocleary.bsky.social•8 days ago

What really fucks me off is Meta could literally by a copy of all your books they spent a billion dollars on making a shit VR chatroom

amhoward.bsky.social•8 days ago

There’s 7.5m books on that Libgen list. Buying a copy of each book is loose change. But I don’t think that’s what most authors want

paulmwatson.com•8 days ago

Yeah and it would be for commercial use which is different to buying book by book to read. They should pay much, much more.

paulmwatson.com•8 days ago

Though to be sure this isn't just about money. It is about rights and control. Not everyone wants their work used in training by job and climate wrecking genAI. This granular work of collecting permission is why they didn't seek permission, not so much about money.

cathylisa.bsky.social•8 days ago

Can we American authors join? He stole our work too!

thehames.bsky.social•8 days ago

I wonder who the mysterious ‘MZ’ was in Meta who green-lit all this data scraping?

emilysturge.bsky.social•8 days ago

🤔🤔🤔 tis a mystery, we'll never know...

mzdt.bsky.social•8 days ago

Has anyone done a back of the envelope calculation of how much it would have cost them to license the use of these books legally, if permission had been given?

I bet it would have been negligible compared to the profits these companies make.

caradelaney.bsky.social•8 days ago

The absolute bare minimum would have been buying each book once. Even if the average cost was $20 per book, that's 150 million. That's nothing to Meta. Even paying ten times that for a commercial license is still a drop in the bucket compared to what they *think* they'll make in profits.

ruun.bsky.social•8 days ago

But if they cordon off the AI from the rest of the business, the money the AI actually makes is negligible compared to a drunk, busking ukulele player on the tube. Hmmm, Having an AI busking for books might be what they're actually doing. But they're not asking. So really it's a mugging.

mzdt.bsky.social•8 days ago

[having heard some efforts at AI generated music, that busker wouldn't get anything but pity coins]

ianwalker.bsky.social•8 days ago

If it's not profitable to sell a product for more than the cost of its components, they don't have a viable business model.

If they're going to argue their chatbot is somehow a social good (but people won't pay for it?!), then the approach should be to seek subsidy, not to steal the components

schokomint.bsky.social•8 days ago

"Social good" as in russian bots?

ianwalker.bsky.social•8 days ago

Just anticipating the people who will try to claim LLMs are the future of humanity or somesuch

vordio.net•8 days ago

Gen AI companies lose money every time someone uses it. It's actually insanely expensive and they are currently just burning investor's money. Nobody will ever pay what it actually costs when they inevitably have to put their prices up. It's a nonsense investor scam bubble.

vordio.net•8 days ago

To actually make money these companies would have to charge at least £200 per month subscriptions. Who's going to pay that for something so unreliable? It's a stock hype bubble. That's why they are trying to force it into education & government. The private sector is a dead end and rejecting it.