Meta Allegedly Used Books3, a Dataset of 191,000 Pirated Books, to Train LLaMA AI
Rogue: Caused harmAI loose in the worldData exfiltrationDERIVED
Meta and Bloomberg allegedly used Books3, a dataset containing 191,000 pirated books, to train their AI models, including LLaMA and BloombergGPT, without author consent. Lawsuits from authors such as Sarah Silverman and Michael Chabon claim this constitutes copyright infringement. Books3 includes works from major publishers like Penguin Random House and HarperCollins. Meta argues its AI outputs are not "substantially similar" to the original books, but legal challenges continue.
What this means for youIf you write or publish books, your work may have been used to train AI models without permission, and you may have legal options. Authors and publishers should check whether their titles appear in known training datasets.
Source: AI Incident Database
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.