A group of authors claimed that Mark Zuckerberg authorized Meta to use “pirated copies” of his copyrighted books to train the company’s artificial intelligence models. This claim was made in a filing in US court.
According to the filing, internal meta-communications revealed that the social network company’s CEO warned that the data set used was “known to be pirated” within the company’s AI executive team. The filing also mentioned support for the use of the LibGen dataset, an extensive online archive of books.
The authors suing Meta for copyright infringement, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman, made these accusations in a filing in California federal court. They alleged that Meta misused their books to train Llama, a large-scale language model powering chatbots.
The use of copyrighted content in training AI models has become a legal issue in the development of generative AI tools like chatbots. Authors and publishers have been warned that their work may be used without permission, putting their livelihood at risk.
The filing referenced a memo with Mark Zuckerberg’s approval for Meta’s AI team to use LibGen. However, discussions about accessing and reviewing LibGen data internally at Meta raised concerns about the legality of using pirated content.
Last year, a US District Judge ruled that Meta’s AI model infringed an author’s copyright by using copyrighted text. Despite rejecting claims of depriving the author’s name and copyright holder, the plaintiff was granted permission to amend its claims.
The authors argued this week that the evidence supports their infringement claims and justifies reinstating the CMI case and adding new computer fraud claims.
During Thursday’s hearing, Judge Chhabria expressed skepticism about the fraud and the validity of CMI claims but allowed the writers to file an amended complaint.
We have contacted Meta for comment.
Reuters contributed to this article
Source: www.theguardian.com
