It’s Meta’s Turn on the Chopping Block for Literary Book Misuse
A group of prominent writers have filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the company misappropriated their literary books and works to train its artificial intelligence software, LlaMa.
- The writers claim that Meta used their copyrighted writings, including unauthorized versions, to train LlaMa.
- This is part of a growing trend of copyright infringement lawsuits directed at AI companies.
On September 12th, A group of prominent writers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, took Meta to federal court over the alleged misappropriation of their works to train the company’s artificial intelligence software, LlaMa.
This move comes shortly after the same group of writers initiated a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, just last week. In the OpenAI case, the authors argued that literary works, including books and plays, play a pivotal role in AI language training, serving as prime examples of high-quality, long-form writing.
In their lawsuit against Meta, Chabon, Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder, and Ayelet Waldman claimed that Meta utilized their copyrighted writings, including unauthorized versions (read: pirated versions) to instruct its large language model in generating responses to human text prompts. The authors assert that they did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training materials for LlaMa.
The pleadings explain what a large language model is and how it is trained. “Rather than being programmed in the traditional manner, a large language model is “trained” by copying massive amounts of text and extracting expressive information from it,” it said. It goes on to imply that “a large language model’s output is therefore entirely and uniquely reliant on the material in its training dataset.”
“Plaintiffs and Class members did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training materials for LlaMa,” said the group.
The Chabon’s works (Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union), Hwang’s (M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face, Golden Child) and others’ “include copyright-management information that provides information about the copyrighted work, including the title of the work, its ISBN or copyright registration number, the name of the author, and the year of publication.”
This legal action against Meta is part of a growing trend of copyright infringement lawsuits directed at AI companies. Earlier in July, Meta and OpenAI faced similar lawsuits filed by a separate group, which included comedian Sarah Silverman.
The lawsuit against Meta seeks unspecified monetary damages and an order to block what the authors deem “unlawful and unfair business practices.”
With these legal battles, the creative community is pushing back against the utilization of their literary works in AI training, raising essential questions about intellectual property rights in the age of artificial intelligence.
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