Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz (born 1968) emigrated from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey as a child and turned that dislocation into some of the most celebrated American fiction of his era: the story collection Drown (1996), the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and This Is How You Lose Her (2012). A longtime MIT writing professor, his standing was shaken in 2018 by allegations of sexual misconduct and verbal abuse, which he disputed; MIT and the Pulitzer board retained him after reviews.

A name on the Meta complaint

In December 2023 Díaz joined Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and other writers as a named plaintiff in Kadrey v. Meta in the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges Meta torrented millions of pirated books from shadow libraries like LibGen to train its Llama models — cross-referencing the pirated copies against licensable ones, then abandoning licensing because piracy was cheaper — and that employees who flagged the legal risk were overruled.

Judge Vince Chhabria granted Meta summary judgment on fair use in June 2025, but confined the win to these plaintiffs’ record, writing that the ruling “does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful” — and that it is hard to imagine fair use covering a tool built on copyrighted books that can generate “a potentially endless stream of competing works.” Díaz has not campaigned publicly on AI; the lawsuit itself is his statement.