2 Apr 2025

What can writers do about their work being used to train AI models?

From Nights, 9:25 pm on 2 April 2025

Thousands of New Zealand writers' books have been used, without permission. to train artificial intelligence models for the world's biggest social media entity.

Meta, the owner of Facebook, has been training its AI on the online 'shadow library' LibGen, which contains millions of freely available articles, research papers, and books, dredged from all across the web.

Is this intellectual property theft, or should we accept that the internet is a wild west?

Joshua Yuvaraj is the co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Intellectual Property, and a senior lecturer in law at the University of Auckland specialising in copyright and artificial intelligence.

He speaks to Emile about if there is anything authors can do to protect their work.

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