The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

Editor’s note: This analysis is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can access the search tool directly here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool for movie and television writing used to train AI here.

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and…