Mark Zuckerberg Must Face Deposition in Sarah Silverman’s AI Lawsuit Against Meta
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will be deposed as part of a lawsuit from authors involving the company’s artificial intelligence technology.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Hixson on Tuesday rejected Meta’s bid to bar the deposition of Zuckerberg, pointing to evidence indicating that he’s the “principal decision maker” of the tech giant’s AI initiatives.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Authors Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden filed the proposed class action last year in California federal court. They accused Meta of copyright infringement for illegally downloading their books from shadow library websites and copying them without consent or compensation to train its AI system.
The case is one of several from creators in a barrage of court challenges over the legality of the way large language models are trained and may help establish guardrails for the creation of technology.
In Tuesday’s ruling, the court said that Zuckerberg is the “policy setter” for Meta’s generative AI branch and the development of the AI systems at issue in the case.
The authors have “submitted evidence of his specific involvement in the company’s AI initiatives,” as well as his “direct supervision of Meta’s AI products,” Hixson wrote.
Meta had argued that Zuckerberg doesn’t have unique knowledge of the company’s operations warranting his deposition that can’t be obtained from other employees or executives. It stressed that the primary issue in the case is fair use, which provides protection for the use of copyrighted material without a license or compensation to make a secondary work.
“Fair use will largely turn on the transformative nature of the AI models and the alleged effect on the market for Plaintiffs’ books,” lawyers for the company wrote in a court filing. The authors “do not need a litany of depositions, let alone, Mr. Zuckerberg’s deposition, to establish or defend these elements.”
In opposition, the writers had argued that Zuckerberg personally issued directives guiding the development and sale of Meta’s AI products. They cited an article from The New York Times reporting that he “immediately pushed to match and exceed ChatGPT, calling executives and engineers at all hours of the night to push them to develop a rival chatbot.”
The court concluded that the authors “made a solid case that this deposition is worth taking.”
Meta doesn’t disclose the origin of the books in its data set used to train LLaMA. While the company has said that the works came from a publicly available data set for large language models, it doesn’t further describe the contents.
OpenAI faces an identical copyright infringement lawsuit from writers. On Tuesday, the two sides came to terms on protocols for inspection of the company’s training data for review of whether copyrighted works were used to power its technology.
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Sign up for THR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
