Novelist and former Fair City actress Claudia Carroll has added her voice to those writers calling for Meta to stop “stealing” their work in order to “train” its AI models, writes Katie Hind.

The best-selling author from Dublin this week said she was aware that Meta had illegally harvested her books and described the situation as “awful”.

The Mark Zuckerberg-owned tech giant has also harvested or “scraped” the works of other high-profile Irish authors including Sally Rooney, John Banville, Anne Enright and President Michael D Higgins.

“It's atrocious,” said Ms Carroll. “It's a major issue and we're going to keep at the Government for a solution.”

With Meta in the midst of a copyright court battle in the US, Irish authors are critical of the company using their work to train its AI models without giving them any payment.

Earlier this year, papers were filed alleging that Meta CEO Zuckerberg approved the use of a notorious “shadow library”, LibGen, which contains more than 7.5 million pirated books.

Last month, US magazine The Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen, through which many authors discovered their works may have been used to train Meta's AI models, among them Ms O'Carroll and many other prominent Irish authors.

The Irish Writers' Union is now calling for the Government and particularly the Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment Niamh Smyth to pressurise “Meta AI to acknowledge what's happened, and then, to regularise it by conforming to our laws and EU laws”.

Union committee member and Dublin-based author and historian Conor Kostick says what Meta has done is “theft, pure and simple”.

Fifty two of his works, which include his 2004 fantasy novel Epic, have been used in training AI.

“You can check by chatting to the AI. I asked, ‘were you trained on the works of Conor Kostick?’ and it said ‘not exhaustively’,” he said.

“Meta cannot say in Ireland, it's fair use to train our model on your works. They have to have a license to use it.”

Mr Kostick said that the issue wasn't necessarily one of financial compensation, but rather of respecting copyright laws in Ireland.

“It (the money) wouldn't actually be all that much. It's the principle of it.”

As of last night, the petition had 1,386 of 2,000 signatures needed to bring it to the Government, with plans to present it to the minister on April 17.

Mr Kostick believes that the Government will be “weighing up” the situation.

“On the one hand, they will feel that it's important for Ireland's strategic future, that big tech operates within the Irish State.

“On the other hand, there's a lot of hinges on this,” he said.

“It isn't just a few authors' incomes. If they let this happen without any kind of a sanction, without telling them to get a licence, without slapping their wrists, if they just let it go...

“Does it mean that big companies can just do what they want, take whatever content they want? So I think that they'll be weighing that up.”

Photo: Claudia Carroll. ©Fran Veale