Scott Turow's latest real-life legal thriller: Suing Meta for copyright infringement

Five publishers and bestselling author Scott Turow are suing Meta for allegedly building generative AI models on millions of copyrighted works. Turow is pictured above during the New Yorker Festival in New York City in October 2014. Thos Robinson/ for The New Yorker Festival hide caption toggle caption Thos Robinson/ for The New Yorker Festival Publishing houses Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage joined forces with bestselling author Scott Turow (and his own company S.C.R.I.B.E) to file a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday against Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The plaintiffs accuse the tech company of building generative AI models on the backs of millions of stolen copyrighted books and journal articles. In their complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the plaintiffs argue Meta knowingly copied copyrighted materials from notorious pirate websites such as LibGen and Anna's Archive to train various iterations of its Llama language model — with Zuckerberg's personal authorization to do so. The complaint alleges that Meta willfully bypassed legal licensing markets to gain an advantage in the "AI arms race." "All Americans should understand that the bold future promised by A.I., has been, to paraphrase the investigative writer Alex Reisner, created with stolen words," said Turow in a statement to NPR. …