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Mark Zuckerberg really doesn’t want to have answer some hard questions about Meta‘s Artificial Intelligence push and goals However, a federal judge this week has told the Facebook founder that is exactly what he has to do.
“Plaintiffs have made an evidentiary showing that Zuckerberg is the chief decision maker and policy setter for Meta’s Generative AI branch and the development of the large language models at issue in this action,” U.S. District Judge Thomas Hixson noted on September 24 in the potential class action initially filed by authors Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Goldenm last year, and now including Ta-Nehisi Coates and others.
Along with a more Imperiled suit against OpenAI, the writers have took Meta to court in mid-2023 over copyright infringement concerns that their work and books have been illegally downloaded and used to train the company’s large language model AI software.
Bedwetter scribe Silverman and National Book Award winner Coates, along with other plaintiffs allege that “much of the material in Meta’s training dataset, however, comes from copyrighted works —including books written by Plaintiffs—that were copied by Meta without consent, without
credit, and without compensation.”
With some legal wiggle room here and there, Meta denies they accessed the author’s work for their LLaMA system. Meta’s army of attorneys have also been trying to push the line that there are loads of other people at the tech giant better qualified than Zuckerberg to be questioned by David Boises and other lawyers for the plaintiffs.
It didn’t fly.
“Plaintiffs do not generically argue, as Meta suggests, that because Zuckerberg is the CEO of the company that he is therefore in charge of everything,” the judge noted in his order denying Meta’s motion to keep the CEO from having to face Silverman and others lawyers’ inquiries. “Rather, they have submitted evidence of his specific involvement in the company’s AI initiatives. They have submitted evidence indicating Zuckerberg was the principal decision maker concerning Meta’s decision to open source the language model. They have also submitted evidence of Zuckerberg’s direct supervision of Meta’s AI products.”
Judge Hixon also stated: “Given this factual showing, the Court is not going to require Plaintiffs to exhaust other forms of discovery before they depose Zuckerberg. They’ve made a solid case that this deposition is worth taking.”
Never a big fan of being put in front of a microphone, Zuckerberg’s depo has yet to have a time and date scheduled. With that, a hearing on discovery in the case just wrapped up earlier this afternoon in San San Francisco that could see the deposition occurring sooner rather than later.
By then, everything AI could be different, again.
Coming up on two years since ChatGPT brought AI to the masses, so to speak, the technology is quickly moving more and more to the fore on almost all aspects of society and industry.
The results are mixed, depending on your perspective.
On the one hand, for instance, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation earlier this month to partially protect the likeness of actors and performers, living and deal. At almost the same time, Lionsgate and applied AI research company Runway unveiled a partnership on September 18 to develop AI customized to the studio’s proprietary portfolio of film and television content like John Wick.
With a bit of a nose thumbing to the court and nudge towards the seemingly inevitable future, Zuckerberg was on stage today in Menlo Park, California at the company’s Meta Connects conference to speak on all things AI. A part of the roll-out and announcements was the news that Meta’s AI chatbot will now communicate in the voices of Awkwafina, Dame Judi Dench, Kristin Bell, John Cena, or Keegan-Michael Key.
Sadly, Zuckerberg will have to give his deposition in his own voice.
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Dominic Patten
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