Meta knowingly used hacked hardware to train its Llama AI models — with the blessing of company chief Mark Zuckerberg — according to an ongoing copyright lawsuit against the company. As TechCrunch reports, the plaintiffs in the Kadrey v. Meta submitted court documents talking about the company using LibGen dataset for AI training.
LibGen is generally described as a “shadow library” that provides file-sharing access to books, journals, images, and other academic and general interest materials. Lawyers for the plaintiffs, who include writers Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, accused Zuckerberg of approving the use of LibGen for training despite concerns raised by company executives and employees who used it. described as a “data set”. [they] know that it is a hack.”
The company removed copyright information from LibGen materials, the complaint also states, before forwarding it to Llama. Meta apparently admitted in a document submitted to the court that he was “deleting[ed] all paragraphs relating to copyright, from start to finish, of scientific journal articles. One of its engineers even reportedly created a script to automatically remove copyright information. The lawyer argued that Meta did this to hide his copyright infringement activities from the public. the lawyer mentioned that Meta admitted to torrenting LibGen materials, even though its engineers felt uncomfortable sharing them “from a [Meta-owned] business laptop.
Silverman, alongside other writers, sued Meta and OpenAI for copyright infringement in 2023. They accused the companies of using pirated materials from ghost libraries to train their AI models. The court had previously dismissed some of their requests, but the plaintiffs said their amended complaint supported their allegations and addressed the court’s prior reasons for dismissal.
