LONDON: Around 100 authors on Thursday protested outside the London headquarters of Meta, accusing the US tech giant of “stealing” content to train its Artificial Intelligence models.

Writers chanted “Meta, Meta, book thieves” as they made their way to the Meta building, with some carrying placards reading “I’d write a sign but you’d steal it” and “Get the Zuck off our books”, in reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

A US court filing earlier this year alleged that Zuckerberg approved the company using the online library “LibGen”, which provides access to copyrighted works and contains more than 7.5 million books.

The Atlantic magazine has published a searchable database of the titles contained in “LibGen”, allowing authors to find out if their works may have been used to train Meta’s AI models. A Meta spokesperson told the Guardian that “we respect third-party intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law.” But AJ West, author of “The Spirit Engineer”, said he felt “abused and disgusted” when he found his work on the database.

“To have my work that took years to write, and that I poured my heart and soul into, used to make tech billionaires even more money, without my permission, is so disgusting,” he said. “They’ve taken my books and fed them into a machine that is specifically designed to ruin me,” he added. West attempted to deliver a letter, signed by leading authors including Kate Mosse and Richard Osman, at the Meta front desk, but found the doors locked.

“It’s very telling that a company that saw fit to steal billions of words is now afraid of 500 words on one sheet of paper. It’s insult piled upon insult,” he said.

West called on the UK government to intervene, saying it was “reprehensible” that Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy had “said nothing” about “the biggest attack on British copyright in history”.

‘Has to be consequences’

Author and TV writer Gail Renard, 69, said that “if you stole a diamond ring there’d be consequences and there has to be consequences”. “The creative industry is Britain’s second-biggest industry. We bring in 125 billion ($164 billion) a year.

If you want to kill off the creative industries, kill off our copyright. There’s a lot of anger here,” added the author.

Artist and author Sophie Parkin, 63, said the situation was “a life-changer for everybody, because what’s the point of going on writing?” “They aren’t even creating anything, they are stealing our words and then making money out of it,” added Parkin, who was wearing a sign on her sunhat reading “AI pay authors”.

She also urged the government to take action, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer of “toadying up to these billionaires”. The protest was yet another instance of creators of copyrighted works focusing anger on companies building generative AI platforms that ingest huge amounts of words, images or sounds to build their predictive models.

The leading AI companies have put forward claims that they are allowed to do so under US “fair use” provisions, but that argument is started to be tested in courts in America and elsewhere.

Published in Dawn, April 4th, 2025