The unbelievable scale of AI’s pirated-books problem

BookBrowse News - The Full Story

The unbelievable scale of AI’s pirated-books problem

Mar 20 2025

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records.

Source: The Atlantic

More News Stories

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    Dream Count
    by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    A searing new novel from the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists, exploring four women's desires.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Raising Hare
    by Chloe Dalton

    A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, and loss through one woman's friendship with a wild hare.

  • Book Jacket

    Girl Falling
    by Hayley Scrivenor

    The USA Today bestselling author of Dirt Creek returns with a story of grief and truth.

  • Book Jacket

    Jane and Dan at the End of the World
    by Colleen Oakley

    Date Night meets Bel Canto in this hilarious tale.

  • Book Jacket

    The Dream Hotel
    by Laila Lalami

    A Read with Jenna pick. A riveting novel about one woman's fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

  • Book Jacket

    The Antidote
    by Karen Russell

    A gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town.

Who Said...

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

B O a F F T

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.