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How Meta’s AI pirates hijacked my voice as a writer

2 1
20.04.2025

Author Janine Urbaniak Reid wrote “The Opposite of Certainty: Fear, Faith, and Life In Between” when her then-10-year-old son was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. 

How did someone like me, a writer of one critically acclaimed memoir, get her “voice” hijacked by Mark Zuckerberg’s artificial intelligence apparatus? Sober 36 years now, I think I would’ve remembered if I volunteered.

In the short version of the story, Meta’s Llama 3 AI model needed to be educated. In correspondence released in a recent lawsuit, senior engineers wrote, “Books are actually more important than web data.” They also acknowledged that acquiring the content legally would take time and money (because actual human writers need to buy cat food). So, with sign-off from “MZ,” seemingly a reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the team downloaded millions of books and research papers from a 

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