A regional daily columnist has hit out at the ‘”wholesale theft” of intellectual property after two of his books were “ripped off” to train AI models.

Andrew Vine, a former assistant editor of the Yorkshire Post who now writes a column for the title, says his books were among 7.5m worldwide that have been “gobbled up” by an online database.

Andrew, pictured, claims the database, called LibGen, was subsequently used by Facebook owner Meta to train its AI models.

In a column published in the YP this week, Andrew described the theft of millions of books as “mind-boggling.”

His comments came after authors and publishing creatives from across the UK staged a protest outside Meta’s London headquarters last week over the issue.

Andrew is one of 11,000 who have signed an online petition calling on Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to hold Meta to account for the unlicensed use of copyrighted work.

The two books in question were Last of the Summer Wine – The Story of the World’s Longest Running Comedy Series, and A Very Strange Way to Go to War, which told the story of a cruise liner’s role in the Falklands War.

They were published in 2010 and 2012 respectively and, according to Andrew, continue to sell steadily.

Wrote Andrew: “Now if I ask the most widely-used AI model, Chat GPT, about the subjects of the books, I enter a chilling and distorted world of fakery.

“Before my eyes, slightly-altered versions of nearly a quarter of a million of my own words, over which I fretted and sweated across two years of research and then months of long, late nights writing, spool out and fill the screen line by line.

“The ultimate culprit for my books being stolen is Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the superficially friendly faces of social media, used by billions of people around the world.

“But there’s nothing friendly about what it has done. On the contrary, this wholesale theft of intellectual property is dark and sinister.

“The actual thieving has been done by something called LibGen, an online database that is as mysterious as it is impenetrable. To describe it as shadowy would be to understate how insidious it is.

“Despite the best efforts of authors’ organisations both in the UK and the USA, nobody has been able to pin down how LibGen has obtained the full texts of millions of books, or who is behind it.

“But a US publication, The Atlantic, has established that Meta used its data to train AI, and managed to crack open LibGen sufficiently to search its database.

“Wriggling through this crack, I found my books. I haven’t a clue how they got there, and nor has my publisher, Britain’s biggest non-fiction house.”

Andrew went on: “I’ve no idea whether being ripped off is going to hurt me financially. The two books in question continue to sell steadily many years after their publications and contribute a modest amount to my annual income.

“But if Chat GPT can more or less regurgitate them for nothing, why would anybody bother buying a copy?

“The government needs to wake up to this brazen theft of people’s work, which risks destroying Britain’s creative industries. It’s not just books, but the whole range of media, arts and music at risk.

“The unholy alliance between Donald Trump and tech titans such as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Elon Musk, can only accelerate that destruction.

“Trump’s tariffs and trade wars will pressure countries into giving these giants an easy ride in terms of regulation and taxation in the hope that currying favour with the president’s allies wins them better deals with the US.

“Doing so ignores the total absence of morality of these companies, and this ought to make us deeply uneasy.

“The scale of the theft of millions of books is mind-boggling. There has been nothing like it in history, yet the company responsible has not batted an eyelid, apologised, or given an undertaking that it will not make a similar target of any other creative endeavour.”

HTFP has approached Meta for comment.