It hasn’t been a good week for Mr. Zuckerberg’s public relations team. A new report suggests that Meta may have used torrent software to illegally download copyrighted books and add them to datasets used to train AI models. Ta. And Zack himself may have approved of such use.
Probably not a great way to increase your appeal to creators within your app.
The revelation was included as part of a copyright lawsuit filed by a group of authors against Meta over the development of the AI dataset, according to a new report from Wired. According to documents released by the court, Meta used a tool called “Library Genesis” (LibGen) to access pirated copies of books to help build the dataset.
According to Wired:
“These newly unredacted documents reveal communications between Mehta employees unearthed during the discovery process. For example, a Mehta engineer told a colleague, “The company (owned by) It’s like saying, “I’m hesitant to access LibGen data because it’s not appropriate to torrent from my laptop.” They also said that internal discussions about the use of LibGen data escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as “MZ” in a memo given at the time of the discovery), who said Meta’s AI team was “approved for use” of the pirated material. I am claiming.
Well, that would not be good for Zack, who is already facing significant backlash for his recent knee-jerk actions against President-elect Donald Trump.
Last week, Meta announced a major overhaul of its content moderation process, ditching its fact-checking program in favor of an X-style community notes system. Mr. Mehta’s approach in both areas has long been criticized by right-wing politicians, including Mr. Trump, but the changes were made during a meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg late last year shortly after Mr. Trump’s election victory. This appears to be in line with what they may have requested of Mr.
After Trump’s Facebook account was suspended in 2021 (following the Capitol riot), Trump at one stage threatened to jail Zuckerberg for life for what he deemed election interference. .
But now Zuckerberg appears to be a regular visitor to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Florida home, and is even scheduled to have a front-row seat at Trump’s inauguration next week.
The change in approach quickly shifts perceptions of Mr. Zuckerberg, who has spent years reshaping his public persona in the wake of past controversies. In fact, Meta changed its name to distance itself from scandals like Cambridge Analytica to avoid association with previous data processing and access issues.
Zuckerberg has also emerged as a more relatable, human figure these days. But over the past two weeks, it seems clear once again that Mr. Zuckerberg values business success above all else, and that his moral standing is driven by profits.
This latest revelation further highlights this and shows that Zuckerberg is willing to potentially devalue artists for his own business interests.
I don’t think it’s a huge revelation after all. CEOs are responsible for business performance and have a debt to shareholders, so it’s not really surprising that they act in the company’s best interest. However, there has recently been a growing movement to support more ethical companies, which could have an impact if revelations like this prove to be true.
But then again, media cycles are much shorter than they used to be, and controversies tend to last only a day or so before the next issue of the day takes over. So perhaps it’s not as big of a risk as it seems, and perhaps Mehta believes that the eventual development of more advanced AI is worth the risk of accessing a single dataset. Sho.
After all, Meta has previously stated that using publicly available material to train its AI tools is subject to copyright provisions that allow such use in certain cases, such as news reporting. It has been argued that it falls under “fair use.”
This seems like a pretty egregious misreading of this clause, but then again, Meta’s legal team has made some pretty bold attempts to justify the company’s use of large datasets. .
It is bold and in a way arrogant, knowing that it has the resources to counter legal threats in oblivion, and that the law is not currently structured to cover applications like AI training.
This bullying approach may be more true to Mehta and Zuckerberg’s actual style, which also undermines the more relaxed persona he has cultivated in recent years.
After all, Zuckerberg is a capitalist, and in this sense, all we see is a businessman maximizing his opportunities. But that could at some stage cause an even bigger backlash against Meta’s products.
