Companies developing AI models, such as OpenAI and Meta, train their systems on enormous datasets. These consist of text from newspapers, books (often sourced from unauthorised repositories), academic publications and various internet sources. The material includes works that are copyrighted.
The Atlantic magazine recently alleged Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had used LibGen, an illegal book repository, to train its generative AI tool. Created around 2008 by Russian scientists, LibGen hosts more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers, making it one of the largest online libraries of pirated work in the world.
The practice of training AI on copyrighted material has sparked intense legal debates and raised serious concerns among writers and publishers, who face the risk of their work being devalued or replaced.
