Meta AI’s imagining of someone trying to steal copyrighted content

Image credit: Meta AI and Marie

Zuckerberg is warning that he’s ready to fight over who gets to control, own, and license online content—even to the point of demanding changes in copyright law

By Marie Griffin

In a recent interview, Meta chairman/CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked if he could imagine “a scenario where creators get directly compensated for the use of their content models” in the training and development of generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI) platforms like his company’s Meta AI.

“I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this,” replied the third-richest person in the world, whose net worth that just crossed the threshold of $200 billion.

In Zuckerberg’s mind, the work of one publisher or creator is as valuable (or not) as any other publisher or creator, and, to borrow an analogy from a dating site, there are “plenty of fish” in the web data sea. He contends that the sheer volume of data on the web nullifies the influence of any single contributor to the pile, but that’s not how copyright law works.

The “grand scheme” that comes to mind for me is the long-running effort of giant tech companies like Meta, Alphabet/Google, and Microsoft to co-opt of the doctrine of Fair Use in U.S. copyright law. These mega corporations continue to profit from the reporting, research, ideas, and creations of publishers and artists without providing credit or compensation.

In his interview with Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge, in late September, Zuckerberg said Meta has “challenges with news publishers around the world” where they are “constantly asking to be paid for the content.”

Rather than addressing the validity of publishers’ legal rights, he then changes the subject, saying that users of Meta’s Facebook are “asking us to show less news because it makes them feel bad.” That’s a reference to Facebook’s decision to present users with a News Tab in their feeds in 2019 and then to eliminate it this year.

Here’s a Washington Post story on that topic. TL; DR: “After years of Meta steadily walking away from news on its platforms, the company’s new AI tool is now using the work of those outlets for content.”

Zuckerberg’s Vision (of Domination) Beyond Social Media

Facebook rebranded as Meta in 2021, a sign that Zuckerberg believes the future of the company rides on an “even more immersive… embodied internet.”

When OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in late 2022, average folks could experience the power of gen AI for themselves, and they became enchanted, knocking the metaverse out of the headlines. Gen AI was touted as the most transformative technology since the Worldwide Web or Apple’s iPhone—or maybe the spear or the wheel.

It looked like Zuckerberg had bet on the wrong horse.

But Zuckerberg had another steed that was ready for this turn of events—an 11-year-old research lab doing cutting-edge work on deep learning and Large Language Models (LLMs), foundational technologies supporting gen AI. With that head start, Meta was able to launch a ChatGPT competitor called Meta AI within a year.

Meta hasn’t gotten the media coverage of other major gen AI platform providers, but it is already a leader in the race.

This is why Zuckerberg’s blatant devaluation of publisher content is such a big deal.

A portion of the content Meta uses to train its gen AI models comes from the daily content generated by its social networks’ users, who surrender some privacy rights by default, but Meta also accesses data from the open web to train its AIs through sources like Common Crawl, a not-for-profit repository of content ingested from billions of web pages on a regular basis, including news sites.

Copyright Protections Under Threat

More worrisome is his allegation that once content has been posted to the web, there is a question of ownership. Once “you put something out in the world,” as he puts it, “to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it?”

Zuckerberg is warning that he’s ready to fight over who gets to control, own, and license online content—even to the point of demanding changes in copyright law. “I think that all these things are basically going to need to get relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era,” he said.

As Creative Licensing International’s Paul Gerbino acknowledges, it’s difficult for publishers, authors, or artists to prove copyright infringement; expensive to mount legal challenges, and counter-cultural for publishers to put aside competitive concerns to band together to preserve their rights. Still, he is calling for publishers to form “A United Front Against Online Piracy” and published six recommendations.

Organizations like the AP, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, News Corp., The Atlantic, and The New York Times have used the weight of their size to push back against content theft, primarily with Open AI, which is the new kid on the block compared to Meta, Google, and its frenemy Microsoft.

Those media companies are making individual deals for their perceived competitive advantage. Not only does this leave most publishers on their own, but it also makes the entire business vulnerable to the tech companies’ greed.

There’s a showdown coming, but publishers seem to have their heads in the sand. Who will stand up to meet the moment?

Marie Griffin is an editor and writer with a passion for B2B. She spent seven years covering B2B media as a primary contributor to Crain Communications’ BtoB Media Business, with a stint in the middle as VP/content & programming for American Business Media. Lately, she contributes monthly to the Association of National Advertisers’ online magazine for senior marketing professionals. Earlier, she was editor-in-chief of Drug Store News and 20/20 eyewear magazine.

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