French publishers and writers are taking Meta to court. They claim the company used their works without permission to train artificial intelligence.
Meta is the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Like many businesses, Meta has added generative AI to its apps. (Generative AI is artificial intelligence that generates content, such as text and images.) Meta’s AI chatbot works much like ChatGPT. Users can ask questions, produce images, and more.
For generative AI to work, it needs to train. To train, it needs lots of material to study. Tech companies compile massive “data pools” to teach their AI models. These pools contain books, articles, images, websites—almost anything you can imagine.
That’s where the trouble comes in.
France’s National Publishing Union represents many French book publishers. It’s one of three groups suing Meta. Union officials claim “numerous works” from its members have appeared in Meta’s data pool. They call this a “massive use of copyrighted works without authorization.” Copyright means that no one can use a work without an agreement with the author or copyright owner.
The National Union of Authors and Composers also joined the lawsuit. The group represents 700 writers, playwrights, and composers. Union representatives call this lawsuit necessary. They want to protect writers from “AI which plunders their works and cultural heritage to train itself.”
Some union members worry about AI creating “fake books” that compete with human authors. You can already find many AI-generated works on sites like Amazon. It can be hard to tell they’ve been produced by AI.
The last group in the lawsuit is the Société des Gens de Lettres. In English, that’s “Society of People of Letters.” This group represents authors. It was formed in 1838 by famous French writers such as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. (Could those men have ever imagined today’s world of social media and artificial intelligence?)
New laws in the European Union paved the way for the lawsuit. The Artificial Intelligence Act demands that AI systems follow copyright law. It also says companies must reveal the sources they use for AI training.
This lawsuit is the latest of many clashes between publishers and tech companies. It’s almost certainly not the last.
You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. — Leviticus 19:15
