Unplugged #12: The Meta book heist, tall fences and old trees, growing is painful, and the pursuit of perfection

In which I try to join the dots between Meta's colossal data theft from creatives, the future of outdoor storytelling, and thinking with simple tools...

A reminder that I am now cross-posting entries on both alexroddie.com and Substack. For more info, read this FAQ. Please feel free to subscribe using whichever platform you prefer.

One of my long-term hopes with this journal is to connect threads between adventure and the spheres of art, literature, tech, philosophy. They're all entangled, but disentangling this mess seems to get more and more difficult as the world gets crazier.

Sometimes, though, it's really simple. I want to make my position clear: I believe the creative outdoor industry should make an unambiguous moral stand against generative AI. It is an unethical technology built on theft and the trampling of creatives' rights. It will make our work more precarious and reduce our earning potential. And it will degrade the quality of adventure storytelling.

Want the long version? Of course you do. Sorry in advance; this week's issue is a long one, but I hope it's worth it.

The Meta book heist

A couple of weeks ago, The Atlantic reported on 'The Unbelievable Scale of AI's Pirated-Books Problem'. The article is paywalled, so I'll summarise.

When Meta began developing their new Llama 3 AI model, they wanted 'a huge amount of high-quality writing' in order to train it. They wanted it quickly, and they didn't want to pay.

They explored the options for licensing this work legally, but decided they didn't want to spend the money or time to do that. Meta like to move fast and break things. So they made a conscious decision to steal the work:

Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

You can search the data set here.

Two of my books were included in the stolen data set. Just about any author you care to search for can be found.

The enclosure of human culture

Meta's justification for this is that it falls under 'fair use'. They argue that a human being can read publicly available work and learn from it, therefore the machine can too.

This argument makes sense from Meta's viewpoint. They believe the machine can be creative – that it can incorporate other views into its own internal landscape, dream up ideas, and make something new. They also believe it will inevitably replace all 'economically valuable work'. If you're impressed by the output of an AI chatbot, this might make sense to you too. Theodore Rozsak wrote that humans are often all too eager to dumb themselves down in order to make a computer look smart... and he wrote that in 1986.

But if you recognise the output of generative AI for what it is – dead content without effort and therefore meaning, draining context from the world one chatbot prompt at a time, enriching big companies while disempowering creative workers and eroding their earning potential – it becomes more obviously a simple power grab.

Furthermore, it cannot be guaranteed that the output of a chatbot is original in any way. It may well contain phrases lifted straight from the training data… and there will be no way of knowing. To me this is obvious: the use of generative AI is, at best, adjacent to plagiarism. And that is an ethical tar pit no creative worker should go anywhere near.

When you use generative AI to generate content, you are undermining your fellow creatives. But the bigger crime lies with those who stole the original material in the first place.

'An affront to the freedom to do business'

The fact is that what Meta have done is illegal. They may claim otherwise, but here in the UK at least it seems pretty clear (and the lawsuits are stacking up in the USA too). This is theft of creative work on a colossal scale, and it's being done with an entitled shrug by the most powerful organisations in the world – organisations who think they're above mere laws or ethics. Meta are so hell-bent on domination and power that they're fine with trampling all over the rest of us, and they'll use the excuse of progress while doing so.

What I find truly interesting is that none of this is new. Meta like to portray themselves as innovative and futuristic, but once again I turn to Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, exploring the clear links between the Luddite Rebellion of the 1810s and the big tech playbook of the 2020s:

They [capitalists] argued that the regulations on the books, which had for generations clumsily if importantly protected workers and helped stabilize labor markets, did not apply to factories and machine-made textiles.
[...]
So: the regulations on the books are out of date, should not apply to new technologies, are stifling innovation; they're really not that important, and no one plans on violating them anyway; the new tech simply enables more secure and transparent processes, and to constrain it is an affront to the freedom to do business. Sound familiar?

Fast-forward to the present day, with headlines like 'Big Tech Is Lobbying Hard to Keep Copyright Law Favorable to AI', and I am Jack's complete lack of surprise:

Andreessen Horowitz — which provided funding for Airbnb and Facebook, and helped finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter — has even claimed that if the Copyright Office were to enforce its existing laws protecting copyrighted works from exploitation, investment dollars could be lost and US national security could be threatened.

In short, big tech's argument is that a) their data theft isn't really theft, b) if people think it is theft then maybe the law should be changed to favour big tech, and c) you'll all be better off in the long run when the machine does all the thinking and creating for you.

Has so little changed in 200 years? Are the rich and powerful still playing the same cards from the same deck? Is it really any different this time, when the sector being ravaged is the creative industry rather than the working-class cloth workers of the first Industrial Revolution?

Erosion of earning potential

Maybe some creatives are reading this and thinking 'This is all about authors, but I'm not an author. Maybe this doesn't apply to me.' To this I'd respond: please can we have a bit of solidarity while our profession is being commoditised?

It’s arguable that AI is a hype bubble, that the tech industry has abandoned trying to solve other problems while it preps for Artificial General Intelligence (the religious rapture myth these creeps believe in), and that AI is never going to catch up to its inflated promise. It’s arguable that true reasoning and creativity are beyond the hard technical limits of this technology. This is what I happen to believe. But the danger lies not in what generative AI is actually capable of achieving, but in what powerful people believe it is capable of achieving – and that ‘good enough and much cheaper’ will be used as an excuse to eliminate humans.

It's arguable that creative work about the great outdoors is always going to require human experience – that this is what will save us, because without bodies on the ground, creatives having adventures, there is no content. And I do think we're in a relative position of strength because of this. But let's not be too sanguine. Right now, much of the money in outdoor creative fields comes from gear brands and tourist boards. A lot of this work is at risk of automation, in my view, unless organisations take a principled stance – and unless creatives stand up for one another.

Will a gear brand think twice about a short film based on an AI-generated rehash of content they've already paid for? Especially if it's cheaper and quicker and 90% of their audience won't notice or care? What about guidebooks or tourist-board content? Is anyone even interested in drawing a line?

Have you sat down and done the sums, figured out how much of your work is actually reliant on direct human experience in the great outdoors? Because I bet it's nowhere near as much as you think. I know mine isn't.

Even if some of our work is probably safe from being colonised by AI, some of it certainly is not. AI is going to erode our earning potential because our skills will become less valuable. I don't see a way out of this trap. Can we upskill? Maybe. But where to, if most forms of creative work are at risk? I see a possible future in which we're reduced to bored meatsacks checking the output of software agents, and I don't like it.

If you're a reader or viewer of this work, how do you feel about the increasing distance between content and reality? What relation, in the end, will it have to human experience in the outdoors – and what happens when we lose sight of this? If you don't care, what does this say about you? What are we all doing here?

It can and it must be resisted.

Collective action

Overwhelmingly, creative organisations are standing up against the LibGen data heist:

• The Authors Guild have published a 'What Authors Need to Know', and to their credit are calling it out as a data heist right there in the headline.

• The Society of Authors are taking a more militant stance, which I applaud. In their main piece they call out the 'catastrophic impact generative AI is having on our creative industries worldwide'. I'm glad to see solidarity from so many authors quoted here. The SoA even organised a demonstration outside Meta's London headquarters.

• The Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) submitted a response to the Government consultation on AI and copyright in February, stating: 'A broad new exception to copyright law in favour of AI companies which binds authors and other creators unless they opt-out is unfair, unworkable and at odds with international copyright rules.'

• More than 50,000 writers (including me) have signed this statement on AI training.

'The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.'

• An American organisation called Support Responsible AI says: 'Stop AI theft. Make big tech pay for the content it takes.' The ads they're running are striking too.

Individual action

• Please don't use generative AI in your work. Even if you think it might be useful or save you a bit of time or money. I honestly believe it's a trap.

• Speak up about the issue with fellow creatives. Make our position clear.

• Champion human values, human perspectives, and showcase the benefits of your unique skills. Develop those skills. Experiment. Be curious and creative. Glory in your quirks and rough edges. Glory in the process. Strive to make your work difficult to automate… which might mean straying from the middle of the bell curve, an area more easily colonised by AI.

• Elevate others, too!

• If you can, challenge publications and brands that use generative AI. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head forcing them to use this stuff; if they're using it, it's due to a deliberate management choice. Maybe they're poorly informed or maybe it's an effort to save time or money, but either way, I'd like to see a unified front against this in the outdoor industry.

• Support organisations resisting further power grabs from big tech (at this point, pretty much every major organisation for creatives I'm aware of).

• Write to your MP and ask them what they're doing on behalf of creative workers.

• If you can, stop using Meta platforms.

• If you can, consider participating in sabotage and demonstration.

Do you want a future in which storytelling about the great outdoors is less surprising, more homogenous, has less original thinking and genuine feeling, and contains more factual errors? A future in which it increasingly diverges from reality?

If you're a creative, do you want your job to be less skilled, less engaging, more precarious, and less well paid?

Do you want big tech to conquer even more of the human condition than it already has?

Please consider taking action.

Recently published

🏔️ The Great Outdoors, May 2025 issue

In the May issue, I worked with Lucy Wallace on a comparative review of hiking boots. My best buy went to the fabulous Danner Mountain Lights. This is perhaps the final nail in my coffin as a former ultralighter, because lightweight these boots are not. They're also expensive. But they're quite simply the best boots I've ever used, likely the most durable too, and as someone who increasingly values buy-it-for-life products this counts for a lot.

In case you missed it, last week I published 'Freezeframe – one last journey into the Cairngorms before the world changed'.

What I've been reading

This week's issue has wound up being much longer than usual, so I'll keep this section concise.

Online stuff

📚 What's the deal with AI & travel writing?

I'm very glad to read this principled take from Talking Travel Writing:

Using AI to write travel articles is, as Fionn points out, a dangerous game to play: not only are these writers effectively plagiarising others’ writing [...], but they’re making themselves redundant in the long-term.

Again we see strong parallels between the 1810s and 2020s:

As travel writers, we exist at the very bottom of the editorial food chain and so have little to no say about whether or how the publications we write for use AI. But what we can do is avoid using it in ways that will allow it to be a catalyst for our own demise.

And, although I agree with the message, here too. I hate to say it but the cloth workers of the 1810s also had strong arguments why their work was better than the output of the machine. Ultimately that counted for nothing. The machine replaced them. I hope history won't repeat itself:

We’re all aware that budgets for travel content have declined significantly over the years, and I’d be surprised if you hadn’t personally confronted the very real fear that travel writing is no longer a viable full-time career for most. Surely, therefore, our collective job is to remind our editors why we, human writers, are the people who should be penning these stories. We can physically travel, feel, taste and smell; all aspects of the human condition that our AI competitors cannot, yet, do.

🌿 Tall fences, old trees

I loved this essay about rural Welsh life from Caught by the River... but it's a rather sombre read, looking at natural heritage, the commons, and enclosure. It might not be obvious at first, but have a read and then think about how it connects to the main subjects of today's newsletter. I'm not going to spell it out. It's all entangled.

📚 Why we need typewriters in 2025

Of course I know that, realistically, 99.9% of writers aren't going to look twice at a typewriter. Why on Earth would they? And yet I keep coming back to the image of Winston Smith writing in his notebook out of view of the telescreen (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four). In 2025, we each carry a telescreen in our pocket. Its tendrils extend, Cruciform-like (Simmons, Hyperion) throughout our bodies and minds. Creating – thinking, being – by non-digital means is a tangible method of resistance, recovery and resilience.

When you choose to write with a typewriter, you are quixotically, nobly flying in the face of the assumption that good = fast, efficient, perfect, and productive. Type your gloriously imperfect words, expending inefficient time and energy -- and declare that you still care about human work, that the process of creation and understanding still matters more to you than the slick products of the machines.

Glory in the ink and paper of your creation, which has not yet been digitized, not yet scraped, not yet crunched.

There is a need to formulate thoughts of our own, whether or not we choose to share them.

Tyrannies have always failed to contain lovers and writers. We must love to write, and write what we love -- with the writing tools that we love.

💾 Markdown and the slow fade of the formatting fetish

Related to the above, this magnificent love letter to Markdown begs us to start caring more about the way we create and therefore think. Fair warning – if reading about .DOCX file formats and markup syntax makes your eyes glaze over, you might want to skip this one. But if you're curious about tools and how they shape us, how the technological environment we choose is political, then enjoy. Simple tools and manual processes set us free.

Though largely hidden, an overly complicated data structure creates all kinds of friction.

Thinking and learning is painful because growing is painful

Markdown is successful with new apps and a younger audience. This is neither a coincidence nor is it by design. Markdown is subversive.

📸 The Pursuit of Perfection

A great piece from Ellie Green on curiosity, process, and learning as we create. This is very much what I believe in.

The best shots we’ve banked are often not the ones we’ve planned, but the one we stumbled into, perhaps the light hits differently, an unexpected story pokes out. Maybe the best story isn’t the polished one, but the one we dared to tell. Don’t wait until you have the best camera, or the perfect drone set up - just get out and start.

In other news

It's been a pretty heavy newsletter this week (sorry about that), so let's finish with a nice little reader's letter I noticed in the May issue of TGO. Sometimes it's good to be reminded that what we do really does make a difference in people's lives. Human connections are what this is all about. See you on the hill, Colin!

Each time TGO drops through my door, it gives me the nudge I need to get outside and explore the beauty of the great outdoors. [...] Please keep up the fantastic work. You're making a real impact on readers like me, who need a gentle reminder each month to get outside and explore. Many thanks.

That's all, folks

If you like what you’ve read, please subscribe to receive updates in your inbox and Substack app. If you prefer to read on my Ghost blog, you can subscribe at alexroddie.com. Thanks for your support. And if you’ve enjoyed what you have read, please tell someone else about it!

Are you receiving two copies of my posts in your inbox? You might be subscribed on both alexroddie.com and Substack. Here’s a FAQ with instructions on what to do.

Header diptych © Alex Roddie. Images produced using a camera and free of AI contamination. All Rights Reserved. Please don’t reproduce these images without permission.