Meta pirated at least 101 of my books and articles, and tens of millions of others
We recorded 4 claims from this post. 4 were checked against evidence. 4 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (4)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“Thanks to a search tool provided by the Atlantic, I discovered tonight that in this one database alone Meta pirated over 100 of my books and scientific articles.”
What we tested: Meta pirated over 100 of Gary Marcus's books and scientific articles via the Libgen database alone.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“In every single case, they used them without my permission.”
What we tested: Meta used all of Marcus's works in the database without his permission.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Many other authors are discovering the same thing; social media is full of reports like mine.”
What we tested: Many other authors are discovering that Meta used their works from the pirated database.
What happened: Katsu explicitly places the start of repeated author discovery posts on Thursday, March 20. Her account also covers Friday; only its Thursday component bears on the target period. (Alma Katsu, )
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“He worked hard on every one of those books and articles and does not appreciate them being used without permission by AI systems with an established tendency towards regurgitation.”
What we tested: AI systems such as Meta's have an established tendency to regurgitate their training data.
What happened: The experiments include LLaMA 7B and 65B and find repeated matching passages. For models with undisclosed training corpora, the researchers use an auxiliary corpus, which limits certainty about individual passages' training provenance. (Nasr and colleagues, arXiv, )
Held from this post (4)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: It appears Meta knew it was using pirated material and chose to proceed anyway.
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: Meta used the Libgen database, apparently knowing it contained pirated material, to train Llama 3.
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: It appears Mark Zuckerberg personally approved Meta's use of pirated books and articles for AI training.