Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, is facing a lawsuit filed by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden. The lawsuit alleges that Meta utilized their work to train its latest artificial intelligence tool, LLaMA, without their consent.
The authors claim that LLaMA’s training involved “copying massive amounts of text from various sources and feeding these copies into the model,” which included their books. They assert that Meta financially benefited from this noncommercial release of LLaMA.
In their court filing, the authors argue that Meta’s use of their materials for LLaMA’s training without their consent makes Meta responsible for enabling others to use LLaMA for their creations. They believe that their work will influence all future content generated by the AI tool.
However, Meta contends that copyright law does not cover book facts or information structure. The company also highlights that the content constitutes a small fraction of the entire training dataset, stating that “their books comprised less than a millionth of the training data.” Meta parallels Google’s use of books for its search tool, citing the Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. case, which ruled such practices as fair use.
Meta asserts that those interested in understanding LLaMA’s training process can refer to its publicly available research paper. It also states that LLaMA will be accessible to academic researchers and individuals associated with government, civil society, and academia, primarily for study, research, and development purposes.
The lawsuit against Meta reflects ongoing disputes and ethical concerns surrounding AI and intellectual property rights. It serves as a reminder for users to be cautious when using content generated by generative AI tools, examining agreements with software providers for warranties regarding the content used in training to avoid potential copyright infringement claims.
Meanwhile, billionaire investor Ray Dalio predicts significant disruptions to the job market by AI within five years. He believes AI will contribute significantly to advancements in productivity, education, and healthcare and may even lead to adopting a three-day workweek. As AI evolves, users and industries must stay informed about its potential risks and benefits.
