It’s a grim week for Meta. The company formerly known as Facebook, and before that Facemash, “designed to evaluate the attractiveness of femal

It sure looks like Meta stole a lot of books to build its AI. ‹ Literary Hub

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2025-01-21 02:00:02

It’s a grim week for Meta. The company formerly known as Facebook, and before that Facemash, “designed to evaluate the attractiveness of female Harvard students,” now encompasses Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Meta, the failed vision for a remote workplace, fun-zone, and Zucker-verse where legs are always just around the corner.

CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that slurs are okay on their platforms, added a pro-Trump UFC boss to their board, and made appearances in the aggrieved weirdo media world to make some convoluted case that we need more masculine energy in business, more resentment overall, and more fealty to Don Trump. Zuckerberg has also recently switched up his personal style so that he now looks like he’s perpetually in a sitcom flashback where an older actor is unconvincingly costumed to look like their younger self.

And in the Northern District of California, Wired reports, recently unredacted court documents reveal that Meta used a database of pirated books to train its AI systems. These documents were unsealed as part of a copyright lawsuit, one of the earliest of many similar cases, called Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms. The plaintiffs in this case are a number of writers and performers, including Richard Kadrey, Christopher Golden, Junot Diaz, Laura Lippman, Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and—jump scare!—Mike Huckabee.