Vanity Fair Senior Editor Keziah Weir ’13 Covers Authors’ Copyright Lawsuits Against Meta’s AI

Vanity Fair senior editor and Bard alumna Keziah Weir ’13 wrote about a lawsuit from authors including Richard Kadrey and Ta-Nehisi Coates that challenges Meta’s use of their books to train AI, arguing that torrenting their books constituted “unlawful conduct.” Over the past two years, Meta has trained their AI, Llama, on a database of over 7 million pirated books. Newly revealed files show that Meta believes these books “are individually worthless,” and therefore fall under fair use, Weir writes. She argues that Meta reduced the books into “a pure asset, devoid of meaning” when they torrented 81.7 terabytes of data through websites like LibGen. “The cases raise existential questions about art and literature—their inherent worth and what it means to commodify them,” Weir says.

Post Date: 04-22-2025