Judge in Meta case warns AI could ‘obliterate’ market for original works

A sceptical federal judge in San Francisco on Thursday questioned Meta Platforms‘ argument that it can legally use copyrighted works without permission to train its artificial intelligence models. In the first court hearing on a key question for the AI industry, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria grilled lawyers for both sides over Meta’s request for a ruling that it made “fair use” of books by Junot Diaz, comedian Sarah Silverman and others to train its Llama large language model.

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a…