Mark Zuckerberg is set to step down as part of a lawsuit filed by writers, including comedian Sarah Silverman, who accuse Meta of stealing their content to train its artificial intelligence assistant.
US District Judge Thomas Hixon on Tuesday rejected Meta's attempt to block Zuckerberg's deposition based on evidence presented by the authors, who said the tech billionaire is the “key decision maker” of Meta's AI tools.
Silverman, along with writers Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, Class action lawsuit filed Against Meta last year.
The lawsuit claimed that Meta used stolen content from their books via “shadow library” websites to train its AI language model LLAMA without consent or compensation.
The lawsuit is one in a growing pile of copyright challenges targeting AI chatbots.
The authors filed a similar suit against OpenAI and its chatbot ChatGPT last year.
Meta had argued that Zuckerberg did not possess unique knowledge about the company's AI initiatives that could not be obtained from other employees.
Meta's lawyers wrote in a court filing that the case is based on the issue of fair use, which “will largely depend on the transformative nature of the AI model and its alleged impact on the market for Plaintiffs' books.”
The lawyers wrote that the authors “did not need a multitude of statements to establish or defend these elements, let alone a statement from Mr. Zuckerberg.”
But the court ruled Tuesday that Zuckerberg is the “policymaker” for Meta's AI ventures.
The authors presented evidence of “their specific involvement in the company's AI initiatives” and “their direct supervision of Meta's AI products,” Hickson wrote in his decision.
The plaintiffs cited An article in the New York Times The campaign, which began in April, accused tech giants such as OpenAI, Google and Meta of circumventing copyright laws to get ahead in the AI race.
The article notes that when OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Zuckerberg found himself lagging behind in the field — and he “immediately pushed to match and surpass ChatGPT, calling executives and engineers at all hours of the night to push them to develop a rival chatbot.”
Meta has said that the books included in its AI training data set are derived from publicly available data sets, but it did not disclose the exact origins.
Meta and the plaintiffs' attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A separate group of writers filed a similar complaint Lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic in August.
The class action lawsuit alleged that Anthropic used pirated copies of authors' works to train its chatbot cloud.
