A federal judge, showing empathy towards AI companies regarding intellectual property matters, dismissed a significant portion of Sarah Silverman’s complaint against Meta for allegedly using copyrighted books without authorization to educate artificial intelligence concepts on Monday.
In July, the actress initiated legal action against OpenAI, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), and various authors for the alleged improper utilization of their works in training chatbots and AI programs.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, who presided over the case, stated that Meta’s AI model heavily relies on infringing copyrighted functions and extracting data from them to facilitate chatbot operations, thereby refuting Silverman’s assertions on Monday.
Chhabria deemed the situation as preposterous, emphasizing the inability to interpret the LLaMA designs as replicas or adaptations of the defendants’ literary works.
Silverman’s claims were dismissed due to her failure to substantiate that the outcomes generated by Meta’s AI system could be deemed as “recasting, transforming, or adapting the defendants’ works.”
Chhabria underscored that the plaintiffs must demonstrate that the outputs “incorporate, in some form, a segment of” LLaMA’s books to succeed in arguing that they constitute a form of derivative infringement.
Moving forward, plaintiffs will likely need to furnish evidence of AI-generated works that bear resemblance to the copyrighted material in cases involving artificial intelligence.
The legal challenges faced by AI technology companies have notably escalated as the use of copyrighted content has become a contentious issue.
In a separate class action lawsuit against OpenAI in September, prominent literary figures such as John Grisham, George R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Elin Hilderbrand, and others, in collaboration with the Authors Guild, contended that such technology is encroaching on the market and presenting rights-related concerns akin to those raised by Silverman.
Beyond disputes over copyrighted content within AI firms, there are also allegations of likeness infringement. For instance, an AI software that replicated Scarlett Johansson’s voice and image for an advertisement without her consent faced legal threats in November.
