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Meta uses millions of books to train artificial intelligence models, which was found to be “fair” by federal court on Wednesday.
The incident, brought about by around 12 authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, challenged the $140 million social media giant to train Llama AI models using a library of millions of online books, academic articles and comics.
The use of these titles in Meta is protected under the fair use provisions of copyright law, San Francisco District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled. Large tech companies claimed that their works were being used to develop transformative technologies.
This case is one of dozens of legal battles as creators seek greater financial rights as they seek work to train AI models that can use their work to destroy their livelihoods.
However, Chhabria warned that his decision reflects the author’s failure to properly assert.
“The ruling does not represent the proposition that Meta uses copyrighted material to train language models,” he said. “It only represents the proposition that these plaintiffs had made the wrong argument and were unable to develop a record in favor of the right thing.”
It’s the second victory of the week for the high-tech group that developed AI after a federal judge on Monday ruled in favor of San Francisco startup humanity in a similar case.
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Humanity trained Claude models with physical books that were cut off and scanned manually. However, the judge added that another trial is needed for the allegations that millions of books were digitally pirated for training.
Metacase dealt with Libgen, the so-called online shadow library that hosts much of its content without the rights holder’s permission.
Chhabria suggests that Metacase’s “potentially winning argument” is a market dilution, referring to the damage caused by AI products to the copyright holders, “filling the market with endless amounts of images, songs, articles, books, and more.”
“People encourage generative AI models and generate these outputs. He warned that AI could “dramatically undermine the incentives for humans to make things in the old fashioned way.”
The author’s meta and legal representatives did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
