It’s an honor just to be plagiarized

Y ou can imagine my pride in discovering that my work is among the millions of pirated books and papers used by Meta to train their newest AI model (dubbed Llama 3). Thus far I’ve found only three short stories out of the dozen or so I’ve written, but hey: It means I’m in good company! A lot of famous authors are justifiably pissed off. The Atlantic reported on this today. Basically, it describes how Meta employees briefly thought about licensing the material, but quickly decided it would be a lot faster and cheaper just to steal it. Especially since most of it had already been pirated and amassed online via Library Genesis, or LibGen. Atlantic writer Alex Reisner set up an interactive database so authors can enter their names and see how much of their stuff Meta has scooped up free of charge. That’s how I ended up discovering my stories. I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have my words comprise a synapse or two in the vast Meta h...