Authors, journalists protest at Facebook headquarters over use of their work to train AI

Authors and journalists are protesting in front of the headquarters of Facebook Nederland on Tuesday against the training of AI models using their work. The action is scheduled just before the start of Children’s Book Week, which begins on Wednesday. The protest is being organized by three primary trade unions and copyright organizations: Stichting Lira, which is the writers' rights foundation, the Auteursbond, Dutch Writers' Guild, and the NVJ, the Dutch Association of Journalists.

The authors and journalists claim that their writing is being saved and shared in so-called shadow libraries. These are illegal online collections in which books and other texts that fall under authors' rights are copied and distributed without the permission of the rights holder.

Several high-profile Dutch writers, columnists, and journalists are publicly backing the campaign or attending, including Sheila Sitalsing, Philip Dröge, Anja Sicking, and Emy Koopman, Marketing Tribune stated.

The group wants a “collective arrangement with agreements about fair compensation, control over our own work and transparency from big tech companies,” the organization said in a statement. The group added that the protest is a part of a collective lawsuit against Meta, the owner of Facebook, that is currently being prepared.

On February 27, Lira, the Auteursbond and the NVJ sent Meta a formal demand letter calling on the company to stop using copyrighted work from Dutch writers, translators and journalists and to stop offering AI models trained on illegal data sources in Europe. The organizations say Meta's response did not open the door to negotiations.

In May, the Auteursbond said more than 600 authors, translators and journalists responded after being asked to check whether their work appeared in Meta's training dataset.

Liesbet van Zoonen, president of the Auteursbond, stated at the time: "We are not opposed to Large Language Models, but the AI industry is a multi-billion dollar business... Authors are not a free resource for AI."