The big news this week was that Meta used a pirate website to download millions of books to feed into their AI – Llama3.

My books weren’t included – I’m not a big enough author or earning enough for the pirates to warrant accessing my books, but a lot of my writing friends from around the world have had some or all of their books pirated, and then fed into Llama3 in order for it to ‘learn’.

And then people wonder why writers hate AI.

I was a fan of AI until this came out, because I find what Meta did was morally wrong. They used a pirate site, which had already ripped off hundreds of thousands of writers by taking their work and selling it (most often without the author’s knowing or receiving payments for it) and then Meta used that, along with everything else on the site, which includes doctorates and other university grade papers to make their AI ‘intelligent’, instead of approaching people and asking if they could use their resources.

Of course, Meta isn’t the only company that has probably done this, but because Meta is a social media giant (with Facebook, Instagram and Threads), it has acquired more notoriety.

While what I was doing was feeding my own books into the AI program I was using, illegally taking something that wasn’t theirs to take in the first place is just downright wrong.

But what can we do about it? Well, nothing. That’s the annoying thing. Authors could do a mass walk off of Facebook / Instagram, but where else are they going to go? There is no other popular social media out there that is like Facebook or Instagram. The closest to Threads (Metas version of Twitter, or X as it is now known) is Bluesky, but there is no other equivalent for Facebook, because it is THE social media platform. But I will be checking out some others, including Mastodon and Vero.

There is Whatsapp – but that means giving my personal phone number out to people, and I don’t want to do that. There is also Snapchat and Pinterest. And while Pinterest interests me, I’m not sure that Snapchat or Whatsapp are really places an author can use – maybe they can, but I’m not sure they’re the right places for me.

There is TikTok – but I’ve been avoiding it – not because I don’t want to do it, but because my audience isn’t there. Mostly my audience are on Facebook or Instagram, and how do you convince your followers to leave and try another social media platform?

Of course, there is my website, but until I can work out how to have more contact with people on there, like having a chat function so I can share information that can go out to all of my followers. I do weekly blogs, but that isn’t what people want. No one except my mum and a couple of other people read these posts. (If you do, leave a like on the facebook page.)

So, what do I do? Do I suck it up and stay? Or do I show Meta the middle finger and find another social media platform to share my news? You tell me.