After suing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Pulitzer winner Chabon and other authors sue Meta over content theft

A group of writers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms in a San Francisco federal court on Tuesday. They accused the tech giant of improper utilization of their literary works to train its Llama artificial intelligence software.

In this legal action, Chabon, Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder, and Ayelet Waldman alleged that Meta employed their copyrighted writings, including pirated versions, to instruct the Llama large-language model in generating responses to human text prompts.

These same writers initiated a similar proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, just last Friday. In the OpenAI case, the authors argued that literary works, such as books and plays, hold significant value in AI language training, serving as prime examples of high-quality, long-form writing.

Meta and OpenAI have previously faced copyright infringement lawsuits in July, filed by a distinct group of authors that included comedian Sarah Silverman. These lawsuits are part of a growing trend of legal challenges against AI companies.

Meta publicly disclosed a list of datasets employed in training the initial version of the Llama model, which was released in February. However, the company did not reveal the training data for its latest iteration, Llama 2.

Llama 2, Meta's first large language model available for commercial use, is offered free of charge to companies with fewer than 700 million monthly active users. This release was seen as a potential game-changer in the emerging market for generative AI software, posing a threat to the established dominance of players like OpenAI and Google, which charge substantial fees for access to their models.

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