Summary
Court records in an ongoing lawsuit reveal that Meta staff allegedly downloaded 81.7TB of pirated books from shadow libraries like Z-Library and LibGen to train its AI models.
Internal messages show employees raising ethical concerns, with one saying, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”
Meta reportedly took steps to hide the activity.
The case is part of a broader debate on AI data sourcing, with similar lawsuits against OpenAI and Nvidia.
As much as I hate much of the news about AI, I love the dilemma this puts the copyright lawyers and tech bros in. Either they admit that the majority of copyright law enforcement is a joke and stifles innovation - or they admit the creation of AI using stolen works is standard practise and requires government intervention to get back on track.