BESTSELLING AUTHORS TO META: ‘WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE AND HOW YOUR STORY ENDS’
In what can only be described as the nerdiest threat of violence ever recorded, Britain’s literary elite have banded together to shake their fountain pens menacingly at Meta, demanding the government make Mark Zuckerberg’s data-harvesting empire pay for what critics are calling “the greatest book heist since that guy stole the National Treasure script.”
CRIME WRITERS PROMISE PERFECT MURDER
“I am a crime writer, I understand theft,” said Val McDermid, whose expertise in fictional homicide has apparently made her confident she could “make it look like an accident” if Meta doesn’t stop using authors’ books to train its thought-having rectangles. “We’ve collectively written 7,428 murder scenarios. Don’t test us.”
Richard Osman, whose height allows him to see threats from miles away, joined the coalition of angry wordsmiths demanding Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy drag Meta executives to Parliament “by their hoodies if necessary.”
“They’ve stolen our intellectual property to make their digital thingamajigs sound smart,” said Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, who reportedly added something profound about the human condition that everyone nodded at without fully understanding.
PARLIAMENT CONSIDERING “SLAP THE SH!T OUT OF ZUCKERBERG” BILL
Government sources reveal Nandy is drafting legislation that would force Meta executives to sit through dramatic readings of every single book they’ve pirated, performed exclusively by amateur community theater actors who “really like to explore the space.”
Dr. Paige Turner, digital rights expert at the University of Making Things Up, estimates the financial damage to authors at “somewhere between a fiver and seventeen gazillion pounds” and says Meta’s actions are equivalent to “breaking into someone’s home, photocopying their diary, then selling it back to them as an ‘original screenplay idea.'”
SILICON VALLEY RESPONDS WITH CONFUSING METAPHOR
Meta spokesperson Chad Algorithma defended the company’s practice, saying: “Books are just data wearing a trench coat. We’re merely helping that data reach its full potential by teaching our question-answering boxes to poorly summarize plots for book reports.”
According to completely fabricated polls, 97% of the British public believe that if you take someone’s life’s work without permission, “you should at least buy them a pint afterward, for f@#k’s sake.”
LITERARY COMMUNITY THREATENS NUCLEAR OPTION
In what experts are calling an escalation of hostilities, authors have threatened to write Meta executives into their next novels as “the character who dies first, painfully, and without character development.”
“You think being trapped in the metaverse is bad?” said a spokesperson for the Authors’ Guild, “Wait until you’re trapped in a 12-part fantasy series as the guy who everyone agrees deserved what happened in the goblin caves.”
At press time, Meta was reportedly developing a new AI tool that could generate apology letters that sound sincere but legally admit nothing, while simultaneously scanning those apologies for new training data.
