Christian Book Publishers Should Protect Authors Against Meta and AI

The recent Meta LibGen piracy scandal has spiritual fallout for human creators.

Last Friday, a colleague at Brazos Press (where I serve as editorial director) got an email from an author who was worried that her Brazos book had been pirated by Meta. She had found it listed in a database compiled by The Atlantic. The journalist behind the database, Alex Reisner, reported that Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, had pirated millions of traditionally published books using LibGen, an online library of illegally cribbed books and research papers.

Any author can search the database to see if their book was pirated. Both of my books were. If you’re an author, chances are yours were as well.

Meta skirted copyright law, stealing authors’ words to “educate” their AI program more quickly than their competitors. As a refresher, AI is a computer system trained to perform tasks that have traditionally required human intelligence. (Don’t worry if it’s confusing; this recent Fresh Air interview is a helpful overview of how AI works and what eth…