Thar Be Pirates Afoot, Matey

So, what do you do when you find out that Meta (a hydra-like multinational technology company consisting of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the harvested souls of countless smartphone zombies) has stolen 40 of your books & short stories to train its darling artificially intelligent monster how to think like humans and generate "original" content? That's right. You write about it. 

According to the Authors Guild, 7.5 million pirated books (so far) have been used by Meta to train its AI. Whose works are included in this vast swath of stolen intellectual property? Type the author's name into this handy-dandy search engine, and you'll see that I'm in pretty good company: Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Orson Scott Card, and JK Rowling, just to name a few.

Authors have no control over what readers do with our books after buying them. (Tear out all the pages to wallpaper the guest bathroom? Have at it.) If Meta wants to use my books, they're welcome to do so. But they need to pay me for my work. According to The Atlantic, it would have taken Meta over four weeks to legally acquire the amount of quality writing needed in order to compete with ChatGPT. And it would have been very expensive. Piracy was much cheaper.

I deleted my social media accounts years ago when our Silicon Valley Overlords started quashing and canceling free speech under the guise of fighting misinformation. So I'm not surprised by this latest dishonest venture. They are the kind of people who design addictive devices and apps for your children, but won't allow their own kids access to them. "Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit" (Matthew 7:17). 

Good news: There's a class action lawsuit currently in the works, and every author of material used by Meta is automatically included in this battle against the forces of evil. We'll see how it goes.