Meta is facing pressure over how it builds and feeds its artificial intelligence, with new complaints touching both the books it may have trained on and the photos it pulls from Instagram.
According to Variety, Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been sued over alleged copyright infringement in a case brought by book publishers and the author Scott Turow. The suit centers on claims that copyrighted work was used without permission — a growing legal question for companies racing to train AI systems on large amounts of text.
Separately, according to International Business Times, Meta's Muse AI tool is drawing criticism over privacy. The report says Muse uses public Instagram photos without asking users for explicit consent, automatically opting them in. Users who don't want their images used must manually opt out. Critics quoted in the report are calling for stronger consent rules around how such photos are handled.
Together, the two stories point to the same underlying tension: the material that makes AI tools powerful — published books and personal photos — often belongs to someone else, and the people who created or posted it may not have agreed to have it used.
The copyright suit could help define whether training AI on protected works is legal, while the Muse complaints raise the question of whether "public" online content should be free for a company to feed into its products by default.
Why it matters: how these disputes are resolved will help set the rules for what AI companies can take, and what ordinary creators and users can refuse.