Meta’s use of millions of books to train its artificial intelligence models has been judged “fair” by a federal court on Wednesday, in a win for tech companies that use copyrighted materials to develop AI.
The case, brought by about a dozen authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, challenged how the $1.4tn social media giant used a library of millions of online books, academic articles and comics to train its Llama AI models.
Meta’s use of these titles is protected under copyright law’s fair use provision, San Francisco district judge Vince Chhabria ruled. The Big Tech firm had argued that the works had been used to develop a transformative technology, which was fair “irrespective” of how it acquired the works.