It’s an honor just to be plagiarized

You can imagine my pride in discovering that my work is among the millions of pirated books and papers used by Meta to train their newest AI model (dubbed Llama 3). 

Thus far I’ve found only three short stories out of the dozen or so I’ve written, but hey: It means I’m in good company! A lot of famous authors are justifiably pissed off.

The Atlantic reported on this today. Basically, it describes how Meta employees briefly thought about licensing the material, but quickly decided it would be a lot faster and cheaper just to steal it. Especially since most of it had already been pirated and amassed online via Library Genesis, or LibGen. 

Atlantic writer Alex Reisner set up an interactive database so authors can enter their names and see how much of their stuff Meta has scooped up free of charge. That’s how I ended up discovering my stories.   

I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have my words comprise a synapse or two in the vast Meta hive-mind. On the other hand, where are my fucking royalties? By my calculations, my share might amount to literally tens of cents.  

Anyway, this is a good reminder that artificial intelligence isn’t really artificial. It’s the product of human work and human ideas, not all of which are great. All AI does is consume Lego blocks of human-created content, then crap out a Lego-like turd of a specific shape. Not to overtax the metaphor, but no matter how fine the cuisine going in, it’s no longer cuisine coming out. 

The bigger issue now, I guess, is what creators might do about this going forward. Hard to see how future works can be protected from the insatiable sucking maw of the various large language models.