Meta stole my book for its AI. Call me a traitor, but I didn't mind

Front and back of the book 50 Greatest Designers on a wooden desk
(Image credit: Future)

It's always reassuring when your darkest suspicions about tech billionaires are confirmed. A couple of months back, The Atlantic dropped a bombshell that would have been shocking if we weren't all so jaded.

Meta had trained its AI on stolen books. Thousands of them, scanned from LibGen, a massive piracy network of stolen publications. All because Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth could fund the British Library until the heat death of the universe, had decided that paying authors was a bit steep.

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Tom May
Freelance journalist and editor

Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.

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