Book authors made the wrong arguments in Meta AI training case, judge says

Soon after a landmark ruling deemed that when Anthropic copied books to train artificial intelligence models, it was a "transformative" fair use, another judge has arrived at the same conclusion in a case pitting book authors against Meta.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the judges are completely in agreement, and that could soon become a problem for not just Meta, but other big AI companies celebrating the pair of wins this week.

On Wednesday, Judge Vince Chhabria explained that he sided with Meta, despite his better judgment, mainly because the authors made all the wrong arguments in their case against Meta.

"This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," Chhabria wrote. "It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one."

Rather than argue that Meta's Llama AI models risked rapidly flooding their markets with competing AI-generated books that could indirectly harm sales, authors fatally only argued "that users of Llama can reproduce text from their books, and that Meta’s copying harmed the market for licensing copyrighted materials to companies for AI training."

Because Chhabria found both of these theories "flawed"—the former because Llama cannot produce long excerpts of works, even with adversarial prompting, and the latter because authors are not entitled to monopolize the market for licensing books for AI training—he said he had no choice but to grant Meta's request for summary judgment.

Ultimately, because authors introduced no evidence that Meta's AI threatened to dilute their markets, Chhabria ruled that Meta did enough to overcome authors' other arguments regarding alleged harms by simply providing "its own expert testimony explaining that Llama 3’s release did not have any discernible effect on the plaintiffs’ sales."

Chhabria seemed to criticize authors for raising a "half-hearted" defense of their works, noting that his opinion "may be in significant tension with reality," where it seems "possible, even likely, that Llama will harm the book sale market."