Why authors are speaking out against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta

“I’m a crime writer – I understand theft when I see it,” Val McDermid told the Guardian earlier this week, in response to Meta using books to train artificial intelligence without their authors’ permission. Facebook’s parent company has been accused of copyright infringement, having trained its AI using a database believed to contain pirated books, and on Thursday the UK writers’ union the Society of Authors staged a peaceful protest outside Meta’s London HQ.

I went along to speak to some of the authors taking part in the action for this week’s edition of Bookmarks, below. And we’ve also got Women’s prize-longlisted novelist Laila Lalami recommending a book she couldn’t put down.

“Take the letter, Meta! Take the letter, Meta!” chant the group of authors gathered outside the tech company’s King’s Cross office when I arrive there on Thursday lunchtime. More than 150 writers have turned up to protest against Meta’s use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence, and to deliver a letter expressing their concerns. But they are not allowed into the building to hand it over.

“It’s extraordinary that they’re content to steal 7.5m books and 81m essays, but they’re not willing to accept one side of A4, explaining how we feel when they’ve been caught red-handed having broken copyright law,” says the novelist AJ West, who is leading the protest.

The authors are barred from speaking to anyone from Meta; a few members of staff have “shiftily” walked past the protesters to get into their office while “not making eye contact”, West tells me.

“The reason for that is because I imagine every single person working in that building today agrees with us,” West says. “If I were an employee of Meta I’d be feeling deeply ashamed.”

Novelist and Women’s prize co-founder Kate Mosse has travelled down from Keswick – she is in the middle of touring her one-woman show celebrating the 20th anniversary of her novel Labyrinth – especially to be at the protest, “because it matters so much”.

“The supreme irony at this moment, as I have travelled hundreds of miles to be here, is that they won’t accept the letter. So the bastion of free speech is not prepared to listen to writers,” Mosse says.

Girl With a Pearl Earring author Tracy Chevalier says her books are on the LibGen “shadow library” used to train Meta’s AI. A court filing made in January by a group of US authors – including Ta-Nehisi Coates and the comedian Sarah Silverman – suing Meta for copyright infringement in the US, claimed that company executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were aware that LibGen is believed to contain pirated material.

Chevalier says her books have “probably been scraped by Meta, who of course won’t let us know that”. (In response to the protest, a spokesperson from Meta told the Guardian “we respect third-party intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law”.)

“Eventually it’s going to affect my livelihood, because soon AI will be able to generate a Tracy Chevalier-style novel and they won’t need me any more,” the novelist says.

“But more importantly, Meta is this incredibly wealthy company and they’re just breaking all the rules because they think they can get away with it. Writers earn on average in this country £7,000 a year from their writing.”

If Meta did offer to pay her for the rights to use her books, would she say yes? “No, I’d ask them to take it down,” Chevalier says. “Maybe if they’d come and asked me first I might have said yes,” but it should have been “like any contract”, she adds. “I either say yes or no, and if I say yes then I want to be paid.”

Novelist and dramatist Nell Leyshon tells me she has come along to the protest “for young people, the next generation of writers who are looking at this and thinking: ‘Why would I be a writer?’ and ‘What do I do with my creative expression?’”

Leyshon’s view is that using writers’ work in this way is “killing” creative expression, and though she would rather “writing machines” didn’t exist at all (“I would rather machines were doing my washing up and my laundry”), the “least [Meta] can do is actually pay people for the use to train the machines”, she says.

“We’re not denying the potential of AI. We’re not saying that you’re not allowed to develop AI,” West says he would like to explain to Zuckerberg.

Instead, the author wants the CEO to respect the fact that his social media platforms and AI “could not exist without the centuries of art and literature that have brought us to a point today where we have such a rich language that now is the blood flowing through the veins of your latest contraption. We’re only asking for our words back. We’re only asking for the rights that we thought we had.”

However, “the person I really want to hear from now is not Mark Zuckerberg,” West says. “I want to hear from Lisa Nandy, our supposed culture minister, who has stood by and watched the greatest attack on British copyright in British history, the theft of billions of words, and not seen fit to say a single word herself.”

On a long flight last week, I started reading Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, and couldn’t put it down. It’s narrated by a teenage girl who is imprisoned with 39 women in an underground bunker. They are under constant watch by a rotating team of guards and have no access to tools, beyond what is necessary for cooking. The women don’t know why they’ve been detained and, as years have passed, memory of their lives before the bunker has begun to fade. So the girl has to rely on her own imagination to find inspiration for her survival. It’s a deceptively simple but wholly propulsive story that explores the interplay between memory, patriarchy and solidarity.

• The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.