Writers Sue Meta over Use of Copyrighted Work in AI Platform

Michael Chabon. Image: Paramount Global/Meta/Unsplash

September 15, 2023 – When a Star Trek fan thinks of artificial intelligence, images that come to mind might include Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data or The Original Series’ M-5. Back here in the 21st century, though, AI is just getting started by comparison, and not everyone is excited about where it’s going and how it’s getting there.

AI is one of the issues that writers are concerned with, as has been noted by the Writers Guild of America in their current strike. Among other worries is the fate of writers and writers’ rooms in the face of AI that can potentially produce scripts for films and television shows. How AI platforms “learn” to do that sort of thing has one Star Trek writer and a number of his colleagues filing a lawsuit against one of the big producers of AI.

According to Deadline, Michael Chabon, writer, executive producer, and showrunner for Star Trek: Picard; his wife Ayelet Waldman; and several others have filed a class action lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and producer of the LLaMA artificial intelligence platform for having “copied and ingested” their copyrighted work in order to train the LLaMA platform. The group has previously filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, producer of ChatGPT.

Platforms such as LLaMA and GPT are large language models, which, according to Meta’s description of LLaMA, take “a sequence of words as an input and predicts a next word to recursively generate text.” The group said, “Plaintiffs and Class members did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training materials for LLaMA.” The lawsuit was filed with the U.S District Court for the Northern District of California, where Meta is based.

Deadline has more on this developing story.