Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Féin president, has said he is considering legal action against Meta after discovering that several of his books may have been used without permission to train the tech giant’s artificial intelligence models.
Adams claims that at least seven of his titles were included in material scraped from the web to develop Meta’s large language model, Llama. “Meta has used many of my books without my permission,” he said. “I have placed the issue in the hands of my solicitor.”
Sinn Féin confirmed that the titles in question include his memoir Before the Dawn, the prison chronicle Cage Eleven, Hope and History – his reflections on the Northern Ireland peace process – along with a cookbook, a short story collection, and other works.
The news comes amid mounting global pressure on Meta from authors and publishing industry figures, who accuse the company of using pirated works to power its AI tools without seeking consent or offering compensation.
In January, a group of leading US authors filed a lawsuit claiming Meta executives sanctioned the use of Library Genesis (LibGen), a “shadow library” of more than 7.5 million books, many believed to be pirated, to train its Llama model.
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