The Cube: AI Stealing Photos and Books from Artists and Authors
- Aug 1
- 5 min read
As a Cube insider, you'll get access to interesting new trends, what we think about them and how you can benefit.
New Trend: AI vs. Creative Artists
On March 20, 2025, The Atlantic published an article revealing Meta stealing pirated books and research papers through a system called LibGen, or Library Genesis, to train their Gen-AI system, Llama. Meta currently owns social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. They’ve been defending themselves in a court case brought by multiple authors whose works were used without their permission. Llama is a large language model (LLM) similar to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. These systems are fed huge amounts of data and are trained to spot patterns within it. They use this data to create passages of text by predicting the next word in a sequence. While AI systems are marketed as intelligent, many critics argued how LLMs have no understanding of what they produce and can present errors as facts. Meta has stated how Llama will “increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life,” but it’s one of many different tech companies that are stealing works from artists without giving them the credit or compensation they deserve.
According to the Authors Guild, Llama and Meta have copied more than 7.5 million books, along with other AI companies. It’s uncertain whether Meta downloaded and used every book in LibGen. Meta and other AI companies have stolen these books for their quality writing, style, expressions, and long-form narration. Books aren’t the only piece of work stolen by AI. Tech companies have also stolen images and news photos off the Internet to train AI models without giving compensation to photojournalists or the news organizations that employ them. With these violations happening, it’s best to ask whether AI is actually being fair under copyright law.
New Insight: Is AI Being Fair?
There has been pushback against tech companies from artists and photojournalists in many different court cases. The Trump administration is developing and seeking input on the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Action Plan. OpenAI and Google have filed a request for tech companies to be granted free use of copyrighted material for AI training purposes. Law professors found Meta’s claim of fair use to be not fair, as “training use is also not ‘transformative’ because its purpose is to enable the creation of works that compete with the copied works in the same markets—a purpose that, when pursued by a for-profit company like Meta, also makes the use undeniably ‘commercial.’”
While justice courts are dealing with the ever-growing power of AI for the first time, it’s not the first time tech companies are taking advantage of other people’s work. They have a history of manipulating legacy news organizations for the sake of revenue and making deals with short-term cash flow. Ultimately, these decisions provide very little as a long-term benefit for businesses since these are creative works that they wouldn’t be able to afford. While wealthy tech CEOs profit off of AI, many writers, musicians, and artists depend on their work to make a living. Instead of hiring the artists and creatives themselves to utilize their skills, they find it more cost-efficient to steal their work under fair use provisions designed for research, criticism, teaching, or comedy.
Luckily, more than 70 authors have stood up to fight for their rights against AI. Authors like Dennis Lehane, Gregory Maguire, and Lauren Groff released an open letter about the use of AI on the literary website Lit Hub. It asked publishing houses to promise “they will never release books that were created by machines.” It was addressed to the “big five” publishing houses in the United States: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. It was also addressed to other publishers across the US. It has more than 1,100 signatures on its following petition, signed by authors like Jodi Picoult, Olivia Blake, and Paul Tremblay. The letter details a list of direct requests to publishers concerning how AI may or will be used in the industry. They ask to refrain from publishing books written by AI tools built on copyrighted content without the authors’ consent or compensation. They also ask to refrain from replacing publishing house employees with AI tools and to hire human audiobook narrators instead of using AI voices to narrate their audiobooks. These are two of their many other requests. According to Susannah Lawrence, a spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster, she states how the publishing house “takes these concerns seriously… We are actively engaged in protecting the intellectual property rights of our authors.”
It’s definitely a hard battle to fight, as justice courts are siding with AI companies like Anthropic AI and Meta to potentially give them the legal right under the fair use doctrine to train their large language models on copyrighted works. However, they can only do so if they obtain copies of these works legally. Not many are convinced, as YA author Riley Redgate states, “With courts allowing AI access to copyrighted texts as fair use, the next… line of defense has to be the publishers. Without publishers pledging not to generate internally competitive titles, nothing’s stopping publishing houses from AI-generating their authors out of existence. We’re hopeful that publishers will act to protect authors and industry workers from, specifically, the competitive and labor-related threats of AI.” This matter is even more urgent since Amazon and other platforms have been publishing copycat books written by AI and attaching real authors’ names to these books to profit off of them in recent years. Of course, it’s done without the authors’ knowledge or permission.
New Action: How to Support Artists in the Age of AI
It’s not enough to be aware, but taking meaningful action is how we protect the integrity of creative work in the age of AI.
Here’s what you can do today:
Choose ethically trained AI tools. Use platforms that disclose their training data and commit to fair practices.
Support human-made work. Buy books, art, and music directly from creators. Follow, credit, and share their work.
Speak up. Sign petitions like the Authors Guild letter or contact publishers urging transparency on AI use.
Push for better policy. When agencies like the U.S. Copyright Office or White House ask for public comment, add your voice to protect creator rights.
Hire real artists. If you’re using AI to brainstorm or build, consider working with an artist directly and you’ll get better results and support real talent.
Creators bring meaning, beauty, and truth into the world. AI should amplify their voice, not silence it.
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