Meta torrented 82TB of pirated books to train AI models

Employees wouldn’t stop emailing each other about it: ‘Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right’.

Ted Litchfield

The US copyright case against Facebook parent company Meta over its use of authors’ work to train large language models has unearthed some embarrassing dirty laundry in discovery. Dozens of emails, allegedly between Meta employees, discuss torrenting massive amounts of pirated material – and seeding those torrents to boot – in order to train the company’s AI models. “The prosecution alleges that Meta downloaded over 80 terabytes from LibGen and another so-called “shadow library” by the name of Z-Library.” It was revealed via court documents last month that Meta had obtained AI training data from LibGen, a large file sharing database that includes everything from paywalled news and academic articles, to whole books. The prosecution alleges that Meta downloaded over 80 terabytes from LibGen and another so-called “shadow library” by the…

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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2025

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