Episode 08: Meta Stole Our Writing to Feed its AI

We knew Zuck was a fan of the podcast. We didn’t know he would go so far as to dig up our old articles and use them, along with a million other books, to train Meta’s AI. Oh, you say he didn’t do it himself, and maybe it’s not stealing (legal opinions pending)? This may be true, or it may just be a topic we debate on this episode. Plus: We review the novel Luminous, by Silvia Park, a touching story of humans seeking connection in a world where robots walk among us.

Luminous by Silvia Park is out now.

Works Cited this episode:

“The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated Books problem,” Alex Reisner, The Atlantic
Jurassic Park, dir. Steven Spielberg
“Everyone is Cheating Their way Through College,” James D. Walsh, New York Magazine
The Confessions, Paul Bradley Carr
Wall-E, dir. Andrew Stanton
The McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals, ed. Christopher Monks
The Early Republic and Antebellum America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, ed. Christopher G. Bates
The Jetsons, Hanna-Barbera
Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott
The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells
A.I. Artificial Intelligence, dir. Steven Spielberg
Blob, Maggie Su
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, David Chalmers
You are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
Star Wars, dir. George Lucas