We wrote to Meta about its plans to use your content to train its AI

Earlier this month, we asked AWG and ACSAA members to tell us what they thought of Meta’s plans to collect data and content from business or commercial posts to develop and train its own products.

There is no clear way to opt out of these updated Commercial Terms, and Meta’s position is simple: if you don’t agree, ‘stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes’.

For many of our members, Facebook and Instagram are where they promote their work, reach audiences and build their career. Walking away isn’t a real option. Handing their work over to train Meta’s AI shouldn’t be the price of staying.

The feedback we received from AWG and ACSAA members was unanimous – “The choice is not for creators to have to OPT OUT as Meta should never be allowed in!” 

We wrote to Meta to ask what it intends to do now that it knows citizens and creators object to their work being scraped. 

Read our letter below.

FULL TEXT:

Dear Mr Easton, 

I write in relation to recent news on Meta’s terms of use, and the fact that anyone posting to its platforms will be subjected to the scraping of their posts for ingestion by Meta. There have been a number of reports that suggest users can opt out, or that this term is only applicable to business accounts, but the lack of clarity has been a cause of concern for my membership.  

The Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG) represents Australia’s performance writers: playwrights, screenwriters for film and television, showrunners, podcasters, comedians, game narrative designers, dramaturgs, librettists, and audio writers. We represent over 3,000 performance writers in Australia. Established by writers for writers, the AWG is a democratic organisation run by its members, who each year elect a National Executive Council and State Branch Committees. Our members work together to represent their fellow writers across the industry, to negotiate for fair pay and conditions, advocate to government, and serve members’ professional needs.  

The Authorship Collecting Society Australia Aotearoa (ACSAA) is a not-for-profit collecting society for screen authors. With more than 2,800 members and partnerships with overseas collective management organisations, ACSAA has collected more than $35 million in secondary royalties and distributed the monies owed to screenwriters from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world. ACSAA continuously advocates for the rights of authors to ensure they are fairly remunerated for the secondary exploitation of their works.  

Our members’ works are routinely posted, in whole or in part, across a variety of Meta platforms. This can be as works direct to their audience, as advertisements from production companies, as advertisements from streamers or broadcasters, as media coverage of their work, as part of award cycles and publicity, as part of prizes and grants cycles, or as posted by our public broadcasters. Whether the content is posted by our members themselves, by a commercial partner as part of a broader news, review, and creative economy ecosystem, or just shared by an ordinary person who really enjoyed a show, our members’ works are a vibrant part of Meta’s platforms. These are platforms upon which some of their income may depend, directly or indirectly, and platforms upon which Meta has incentivised and encouraged dependence.  

On the face of it, Meta’s act of scraping this copyrighted content using its generative AI models would be an infringement of our members’ moral and economic rights, as well as the rights of any other party involved in the production of that work (for example, the ABC, a streaming company posting an ad, or potentially the Guild). We are also concerned about the byzantine work required to complete an objection form and the potential abuse of market power to seek clarity from the competition regulator on behalf of our members.  

We surveyed our members to ask their views on the terms, and provide some of their feedback below. 

“Zuck, stop stealing our sh*t ya dead-eyed goon.”

"F**k off, f**k you. But in more polite terms, hands off my ENTIRE CAREER."

“There should be absolutely NO right for Meta to do what it intends to do. The choice is not for creators to have to OPT OUT as Meta should never be allowed in!”

“Meta – at least give us an opt-out option!”

“Handing over my IP to another business as a term of doing business is extortion 

“You are changing a service to a source. This quite simply is theft.”

“Do your own work. We’ve worked years on ours and you are stealing it.”

“My creations are not your property. The creations of my friends and colleagues are not your property. Stop. Just stop.”

“Offering a free product as an intentional lure then turning around and using that to make paid content of your own without proper compensation of the people you scraped/used is outright stealing and utterly shameful.”

Our concerns go beyond copyright and our members as creative workers. Our members, along with many of your users, may also post their kids’ photos, their grandparent’s funeral notices, their own wedding anniversary photos. Of course those are copyrighted works, but they are also indelibly human artefacts, and not ones you should have to work hard to have ‘un-scraped’.  

Of course, our concerns (as ventilated publicly) about tech companies’ infringement of First Nations works and cultural sovereignty remain, and we welcome your feedback on how you respect the First Nations works and people using your platforms.

Can you please provide to us an assurance that your platforms will not scrape our members’ works and outline how you ensure your platforms do not infringe our members’ works?

Best, 

Claire Pullen

Group CEO

Australian Writers’ Guild (AWG) and Authorship Collecting Society Australia Aotearoa (ACSAA)