'We need to speak up': Authors protest against Meta training AI on their work

Landing a publishing deal was a dream come true for Jack Strange.

"It was incredible. I'd had so many rejections along the way," he says.

"So when someone said yes, I cried because it's everything I ever wanted."

Before Jack published debut novel Look Up, Handsome, he'd written other, self-published titles.

But he felt an entirely different emotion when he found out that those works had appeared on LibGen - a so-called "shadow library" containing millions of books and academic papers taken without permission.

An investigation by The Atlantic magazine revealed Meta may have accessed millions of pirated books and research papers through LibGen - Library Genesis - to train its generative AI (Gen-AI) system, Llama.

Now author groups across the UK and around the world are organising campaigns to encourage governments to intervene.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is currently defending a court case brought by multiple authors over the use of their work.

Llama is a large language model, or LLM, similar to Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

The systems are fed huge amounts of data and trained to spot patterns within it. They use this data to create ages of text by predicting the next word in a sequence.

Despite the systems being labelled intelligent, critics argue LLMs do not "think", have no understanding of what they produce and can confidently present errors as fact.

Tech companies argue that they need more data to make the systems more reliable, but authors, artists and other creatives say they should pay for the privilege.

A Meta spokesperson told BBC Newsbeat it had "developed transformational GenAI powering incredible innovation, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies".

They added that "fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this", and that the company wants to develop AI that benefits everyone.

As well as concerns over copyright and accuracy, AI systems are also power-hungry, prompting environmental fears, and worries they could threaten jobs.

While Jack's debut novel wasn't part of the LibGen dataset, he did find some of his self-published books had been taken.

He says he wasn't surprised because he'd seen so many fellow authors affected, but that it did spur him on to want to do something about it.

"There's always something you can do. You can't just say 'oh well'. You've got to speak up and fight back," he tells BBC Newsbeat.

Meta says open source AI like Llama will "increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life".

But Jack says it poses a real risk to creatives like him.

"It's annoying that the first thing AI comes for are creative jobs that bring you joy.

"We're so undervalued already, and we're even more undervalued now with AI coming in."

Jack says going up against a company like Meta, which is worth more than a trillion dollars, doesn't feel like a fight he can take on alone.

"How much control can you take back when your work has already been taken?

"How do we live with that and how do we get protected from that":[]}