Mark Zuckerberg will go to court for A.I. lawsuit while plowing ahead with new celeb endorsements

A judge has ruled that Meta exec Mark Zuckerberg will indeed have to show up for deposition over the artificial intelligence lawsuit filed by Sarah Silverman and two other authors, per The Hollywood Reporter. Meta attempted to argue that there are plenty of other people working on this tech at the company that could answer a court’s questions. But the authors’ legal team in the proposed class-action lawsuit successfully argued that Zuckerberg is the “principal decision maker” of the company’s A.I. policies. 

The lawsuit concerns claims from Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden that Meta infringed upon the copyright for their books by using illegally downloaded copies to train its A.I. Ultimately, it’s a case about precedent, as there doesn’t yet exist much regulation in regard to A.I. and copyright. In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg was dismissive about the contribution of any one artist’s work to training large language models. But he and the company will argue that the case is a question of fair use. “I think that in any new medium in technology, there are the concepts around fair use and where the boundary is between what you have control over,” he told The Verge. “When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it? I think that all these things are basically going to need to get relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era.”

Well, the litigation is happening, but it probably won’t slow down Big Tech’s A.I. ambitions. In fact, there do not seem to be any legal or moral quandaries (The Washington Post reports that “the voracious electricity consumption of artificial intelligence is driving an expansion of fossil fuel use,” which isn’t great!) that would deter Meta from moving forward. On the contrary, Meta is moving to best its competitor OpenAI by introducing celebrity voices to its Meta AI chatbot. Now if you ask the chatbot a question, it can read the answer aloud in the voice of Awkwafina, Kristin Bell, John Cena, Dame Judi Dench, or Keegan-Michael Key, according to CBS News. OpenAI got in trouble for that when its chatbot sounded a little too much like Scarlett Johansson, but it appears Meta went above board and actually got these celebs’ permission (likely by paying a hefty fee) to recreate their voices. The voice feature is meant to be a “more natural way of interacting with AI than text,” while the familiar voices make it “more fun.” You know, like if Nero is fiddling while the world burns, at least it’s a concert.