Meta's use of copyrighted books to trains its Llama AI was fair use, a judge ruled.
"This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," he 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."
The plaintiffs focused their arguments on how Meta's AI models can reproduce exact snippets from their works and how the company's Llama models hurt their ability to license their books to AI companies. These arguments weren't as compelling in Chhabria's eyes -- he called them "clear losers" -- so he sided with Meta.
That's different from the Anthropic ruling, where Judge William Alsup focused on the "exceedingly transformative" nature of the use of the plaintiff's books in the results AI chatbots spit out. Chhabria wrote that while "there is no disputing" that the use of copyrighted material was transformative, the more urgent question was the effect AI systems had on the ecosystem as a whole.
Maybe? Not lawyer, but sound like train might fair use? And generate not?