If you are a fan of the investigative reporter Bob Woodward, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, biographer Walter Isaacson, action writers Jack Carr and Brad Thor, or classic authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ray Bradbury, and even Britney Spears, what do all those writers have in common?  They are all published by Simon & Schuster.

They also nearly became more deposits for Meta’s AI landfill.  You don’t have to have grown up surrounded by books for that bit of news to make you heave or at least despair.  But it highlights two indicia of cultural collapse:  That Mark Zuckerberg, robotics answer  to Jay Gatsby, even thought about such a vile project and perhaps more importantly, that no one really knew about it until the New York Times wrote about it recently. (It’s well worth rereading that Times articles as it is so rich in detail that nuggets jump out that you missed before.)

This is kind of like a drunk 15 year old waiving a gun in your face. But let’s be frank—there is something very wrong with these people.  But how twisted are they?

Another revealing article in The Guardian describes the lust for data that drives victims to the AI charnel house:

According to [whistleblower] recordings [of internal Meta meetings], Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told executives that the company had used almost every book, poem and essay written in English available on the internet to train models, so was looking for new sources of training material.

Employees said they had used these text sources without permission and talked about using more, even if that would result in lawsuits. When a lawyer flagged “ethical” concerns about using intellectual property, they were met with silence.

Note that “ethical” is in scare quotes.  Understand this:  The ethical concern was not the choice of hoovering up the history of English literature to be ground to bits in the new, new thing of generative AI.  That’s not the conversation that lawyers would have.  Or at least not most lawyers.

The “ethical” concern was getting caught doing it.

The Times story also discusses similar meetings at Meta where the lawyers brought up getting caught in their race to catch their competitor OpenAI.

Meta’s executives said OpenAI seemed to have used copyrighted material without permission. It would take Meta too long to negotiate licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry, they said, according to the recordings.

“The only thing that’s holding us back from being as good as ChatGPT is literally just data volume,” Nick Grudin, a vice president of global partnership and content, said in one meeting.

OpenAI appeared to be taking copyrighted material and Meta could follow this “market precedent,” he added.

Meta’s executives agreed to lean on a 2015 court decision involving the Authors Guild versus Google, according to the recordings. In that case, Google was permitted to scan, digitize and catalog books in an online database after arguing that it had reproduced only snippets of the works online and had transformed the originals, which made it fair use.

The Google Books case will go down in history as one of the worst copyright decisions by any court in the world.  The main reason it is so illogical and so awful is that it allowed Google to digitize all the literature of the world as long as it only made these snippets available.  Nobody paid attention to the nondisplay uses of the digitized works or that Google was creating one of the first large language models right under the nose of the court.  

It is, of course, possible to distinguish even this crappy legal work product from AI training, but you can see that the harm is already done.  Perhaps the real harm is that Big Tech sociopathic overlords do not see the disaster they are creating by snorting up the world’s literature, culture and journalistic reality, not to mention the posts of users going about their daily lives in stark violation of all that makes humans human in their race to convert humans into an outboard device.

Maria A. Pallante, formerly one of our greatest heads of the U.S. Copyright Office and currently president of the Association of American Publishers, is quoted by the Guardian story, not believing that Simon & Schuster would have agreed to the sale. 

“The fact that Meta sought to purchase one of the most important publishing houses in American history in order to ingest its venerable catalogue for AI profits is puzzling even for Big Tech,” she said. “Did Meta plan to trample the primary mission of Simon & Schuster, and its contractual partnerships with authors, by sheer power?”

The answer to that question is, of course, absolutely.  Meta absolutely intended to trample all of that and more, and the truth is very likely that they’ve already done it and the sale was just a way to cover their apex predator tracks retroactively.  That’s exactly what Google had done in the Google Books case.

Remember, you know you are tracking an apex predator when you find scat with bits of bones and fur from prior lunches and dinners.

You know, fair use.