BBC Newsbeat<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Landing a publishing deal was a dream come true for Jack Strange.<\/p>\n “It was incredible. I’d had so many rejections along the way,” he says.<\/p>\n “So when someone said yes, I cried because it’s everything I ever wanted.”<\/p>\n Before Jack published debut novel Look Up, Handsome, he’d written other, self-published titles.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n An investigation by The Atlantic magazine<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Now author groups across the UK and around the world are organising campaigns to encourage governments to intervene.<\/p>\n Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is currently defending a court case brought by multiple authors over the use of their work. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Llama is a large language model, or LLM, similar to Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.<\/p>\n The systems are fed huge amounts of data and trained to spot patterns within it. They use this data to create passages of text by predicting the next word in a sequence.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A Meta spokesperson told BBC Newsbeat it had “developed transformational GenAI powering incredible innovation, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies”.<\/p>\n They added that “fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this”, and that the company wants to develop AI that benefits everyone.<\/p>\n As well as concerns over copyright and accuracy, AI systems are also power-hungry<\/a>, prompting environmental fears, and worries they could threaten jobs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While Jack’s debut novel wasn’t part of the LibGen dataset, he did find some of his self-published books had been taken.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n Meta says open source AI like Llama will “increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life”<\/a>. <\/p>\n But Jack says it poses a real risk to creatives like him.<\/p>\n “It’s annoying that the first thing AI comes for are creative jobs that bring you joy. <\/p>\n “We’re so undervalued already, and we’re even more undervalued now with AI coming in.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “How much control can you take back when your work has already been taken?<\/p>\n “How do we live with that and how do we get protected from that?”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He’s one of a growing number of writers calling on the government to intervene, with a demonstration planned on Thursday near Meta’s London office, as well as action online.<\/p>\n Abie Longstaff works at the Society of Authors, a union representing writers, illustrators and translators, and tells Newsbeat they have been raising concerns about the risks of AI for years.<\/p>\n “We all feel that level of helplessness,” she says. “But we’re all fighting so hard.”<\/p>\n She says her work has also been stolen and used to train AI, something she believes has an impact on future publishing opportunities.<\/p>\n “Large language models work by prediction, they work by looking at patterns. They want our voice, they want our expression, they want our style. <\/p>\n “So you can as a normal person go onto one of these sites and say ‘please can you write me a book in the style of Abie Longstaff’ and they’ll write it in my style, in my voice.”<\/p>\n Because their works have been scraped though, writers won’t get any compensation or recognition if it’s used this way.<\/p>\n “We want to see compensation, we want to see that it’s more transparent,” Abie says.<\/p>\n “The company has taken our books and used it to make money. It has money, but instead of paying us for our intellectual property instead of licensing a word, it’s taking it all for free.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Society of Authors as well as other unions like the Writers’ Guild are encouraging writers to get in touch with their MPs to raise their concerns in government.<\/p>\n![\"Jack](\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/480\/cpsprodpb\/b6d8\/live\/8e2d6b40-0a2e-11f0-99ca-0fb0741d66d7.jpg.webp\")
Jack Strange<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n‘More difficult with AI coming in’<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Facing down a trillion dollar company <\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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