Meta uses stolen books to train AI and hurts the little guy

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Whispers of an article by The Atlantic started to make it’s rounds Wednesday, March 19, 2025 on social media. By the following day the worst of fears were confirmed by authors as they put their names into the search box provided by the online periodical. Their work, their books, had been stolen. Then, an additional realization, like a dagger to the soul, came when they discovered that their stolen work was used to train Mark Zuckerberg’s AI, Llama 3.

My own book being one of them.

As the stages of grief took their course, I looked closer into the matter. In a tweet by vx-underground, reviled court documents in the case of Kadrey v. Meta that nearly 82 TB of books from, “Anna's Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen to train Meta artificial intelligence,” were used. ARTnews reported that 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers were on LibGen at the time that Meta used that data.

Partial tweet from vx-underground. Click the link to see the full post.

While popular authors such as Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, and Colleen Hoover, are without a doubt victims of this time of crime, they are also no strangers to having their books pirated. However, as I scroll through several social media apps, hardly any of my author mutuals were not affect by this act. There is no way of telling how many independent or self-publish authors make up the numbers reported above. While lists of well known works from LibGen’s collection are reported, there is no list of indie authors.

Neil Gaiman touts that he does well because of book pirates, it helps him sell more books, he says; yet, that is not the case for the indie author.

Unless an independent author has their books wide, as in their ebooks are available legally in several places online, piracy of their work can mean the end of their career. Amazon’s exclusivity clause for their subscription service, Kindle Unlimited (KU), limits an authors ebooks to only be part of KU.

I have seen video after video of authors on TikTok crying about how they lost their account and their royalties because someone pirated their books and Amazon’s bots found them outside of KU. I removed my books from KU years ago and put them on places such as Kobo, that does not restrict where an author can sell their work while also being part of their subscription service, Kobo+. However, for many authors, KU is their bread and butter. Leaving Amazon’s subscription service means loss of revenue that they rely on to pay their bills. While the affects of piracy means little harm to my work, Meta’s selfish act might have just cost thousands of authors jeopardy of their Amazon accounts and money.

I don’t think Zuckerberg thought about the ripple effect he just caused by telling his staff to use pirated books, nor do I think he cares. He is only worth $206.1 Billion dollars with a $1.5 Trillion dollar company. He could have paid for the licencing to use certain works, instead he has to keep up with the competition of OpenAI and DeepSeek and find short cuts— stolen books. Time is money, after all. But what about the indie author who relies on page reads from KU?

Many authors can end up paying a few thousand dollars just to publish their book. That price tag includes: cover art, editing, ISBN, copyright, and marketing. Then, KU pays by the page read, which is about 0.004 cents/page, depending on the number of subscribers. Authors make about 70% of the listed price of the book. How many $2.99 books have you enjoyed?

Authors write for the love of the craft, not the money, and fortune only smiles on a few.

What Mark Zukerberg did is pure greed and selfishness, and that’s before we get into the harm of copyright infringement and what this will mean for AI down the road. Class action lawsuits are already in full swing. You can read more about that through the Authors Guild, and if you are an author that is a victim in this circumstance, they have a guide on what to do.

Piracy isn’t a victimless crime, and piggybacking based off of someone else’s sweat, blood, and tears, is cheating. So while Mark is trying to keep up with AI Jones’, and is set to do so at whatever means necessary at zero cost to him, he has cost the livelihoods of countless authors in with a simple stroke of his kingly finger.

Indie authors will never be listed in an article in connection to this. So please, leave a comments with your name/pen name and how many books were found in the database shared by The Atlantic.