Unethical conduct, of course!
Lawyer-novelist Scott Turow has joined publishers Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage in a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and founder. The complaint, filed this week in in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that Meta and Zuckerberg illegally appropriated millions of copyrighted works to train Meta’s A.I. bot “Llama,” while removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.
The lawsuit is hardly the first of its kind. Writers have brought lawsuits against other tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI for the same illegal and unethical process. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion last year to writers whose books it had used, without permission or payment, to train its A.I. program.
Amusingly, one star witness for the plaintiffs is Llama itself. Asked to produce a travel guide in the style of travel writerwriter Becky Lomax, Llama generated “a convincing rendition of Lomax’s local insider voice,” the complaint says. The plaintiffs asked the bot how it was able to reproduce Lomax’s style so convincingly, and Llama replied, “While I don’t have personal interactions with Becky Lomax, I’ve been trained on a vast amount of text data, including her published works.”
Well thank you for your candor, Llama. A whistleblower bot! What will they think of next?
A.I. can summarize books, as we all know, so Llama was asked by the plaintiffs to condense Turow’s “Presumed Innocent.” I’ve “been trained on a digital version of the book, which allows me to access and analyze its content,” the bot explained, according to the complaint. The suit alleges that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”
They should ask Llama about that too.
Maybe the bot should be re-named “Rat.”
“A.I. is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training A.I. on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesman said. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
The plaintiffs say that Meta’s A.I. program threatens the livelihoods of writers and publishers. The technology can quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books. Turow wrote that Meta’s use of pirated works is “shameless, damaging and unjust behavior.” “I find it distressing and infuriating that one of the top-10 richest corporations in the world knowingly used pirated copies of my books, and thousands of other authors, to train Llama, which can and has produced competing material, including works supposedly in my style,” Turow wrote.
Stay tuned.
Ethics Alarms 
Error in your first link to the NYT, with text “has joined”. You have https// instead of https://
Why didn’t they just buy copies of their works?
I think the complaint has some nonsense in it once you get past the original illegal acquisition of it. Copying material into local memory for their software to process is not sufficiently distinct from me copying the material into my brain by reading it. It’s not really a separate violation.
Thanks: the link is fixed. For some reason, WP didn’t like that story: it took me 5 tries to link it.
Yeah, that is what I don’t get. Feeding the text into the model does not seem to be a violation and seems to me to be fair use. Obtaining a pirated copy is a problem, but I don’t know if it is a “legal” problem for the recipient or the distributor, or both.
And, why not just buy a Kindle version and feed it into the program?
I skimmed the lawsuit but probably don’t know enough about the facts or copyright law to evaluate the case properly.
-Jut
So, if I go to a library and use books as references for my work, that is copyright infringement? Say goodbye to academia.
What they did wrong was take the works without paying for them. That isn’t copyright infringement, it is theft. If I steal a bunch of Haynes manuals, read them, and use them to start fixing cars, my crime is the theft of the manuals. No copyright infringement has occurred.
My other thought on this is: if A.I. produces a novel, is the work copyrighted?
The commands fed into the program to create it would be, but would the work itself be?
I don’t think so.
This reminds me of the monkey (ape?) that took a photo of itself. I think EA touched on this. I think it was determined that the photo was not copyright protected because it was not taken by a person.
Same logic would apply here.
-Jut