Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) during a hearing on Wednesday said that Meta “willfully” pirated “droves of copyrighted content” to train its artificial intelligence models.
Hawley chaired Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee Crime & Terrorism Subcommittee hearing on the artificial intelligence industry’s alleged “mass ingestion of copyrighted works for AI training.”
The hearing featured testimony from bestselling authors such as David Baldacci and AI experts as well as law professors.
Hawley said about Meta’s alleged pirating of copyrighted material:
They knew exactly what they were doing. They pirated these materials willfully, as the idea of pirating and copyrighted works percolated through Meta to take one example. Employee after employee warned management that what they were doing was illegal. One Meta employee told management and I quote now, “This is not trivial.” And she shared an article asking what is the probability of getting arrested for using torrents, illegal downloads, in the United States. Another Meta employee shared a different article saying that downloading from illegal repositories would open Meta up to legal ramifications.
“That’s a nice way of saying that what they were doing was exactly, totally, 100 percent barred by copyright law. Did Meta management listen? No. They bulldozed straight ahead,” he added.
Hawley said the hearing exhibited evidence that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself made the decision himself to use the pirated materials and management tried to hide it.
“Every single one of my books was presented to me … in three seconds. It really felt like I had been robbed of everything of my entire adult life that I had worked on,” Baldacci said during the hearing.
“They tried to hide the fact that they were engaged in illegal download of pirated works,” Hawley added, noting that the company allegedly used non-company servers.
“Get this, Meta trained its AI model to lie to users about what data it had been trained on,” he continued.
The former Missouri attorney general said these actions are not aggressive business conduct; he said it is “criminal conduct.”
“Meta’s conduct is not an exception, this is the rule to when it comes to what has happened in the AI space among these mega companies,” he said.
Hawley’s office said in a press release that AI companies used over 200 terabytes of copyrighted work.
White House AI Czar David Sacks said in June, “There must be a fair use concept for training data or models would be crippled. China is going to train on all the data regardless, so without fair use, the U.S. would lose the AI race.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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