Court documents show not only did Meta torrent terabytes of pirated books to train AI models, employees wouldn’t stop emailing each other about it: ‘Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right’

First reported by Ars Technica, the copyright case against Facebook parent company Meta over its use of authors’ work to train large language models has unearthed some embarrassing dirty laundry in discovery. Dozens of emails, allegedly between Meta employees, discuss torrenting massive amounts of pirated material⁠—and seeding those torrents to boot⁠—in order to train the company’s AI models.

It was revealed via court documents last month that Meta had obtained AI training data from…