Mark, My Words

Paul Bradley Carr

20 Mar 2025 — 1 min read

Fascinating and outrageous piece by Alex Reisner in The Atlantic today about how Facebook used a gigantic repository of pirated books to train their AI models.

When employees at meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

I think you know the answer. Helpfully, Reisner also provided a searchable database for authors to see if their books were amongst the titles illegally ingested by Zuckerberg's robot plagiarism machine.

Of course, glutton for punishment that I am, I had to check...

Sons of assholes.

Still, it's a shame they stole all my books before The Confessions is published.

I think Meta's unethical AI would have enjoyed reading about my ethical AI, which kills itself out of guilt for all the crimes it has helped commit. Food for thought.

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Mark, My Words

Paul Bradley Carr

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Guest Post: The persistence of indie bookstores

British covers are always better

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