Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch; Court filings show Meta paused efforts to license books for AI training
"According to one transcript, Sy Choudhury, who leads Meta’s AI partnership initiatives, said that Meta’s outreach to various publishers was met with “very slow uptake in engagement and interest.”
“I don’t recall the entire list, but I remember we had made a long list from initially scouring the Internet of top publishers, et cetera,” Choudhury said, per the transcript, “and we didn’t get contact and feedback from — from a lot of our cold call outreaches to try to establish contact.”
Choudhury added, “There were a few, like, that did, you know, engage, but not many.”
According to the court transcripts, Meta paused certain AI-related book licensing efforts in early April 2023 after encountering “timing” and other logistical setbacks. Choudhury said some publishers, in particular fiction book publishers, turned out to not in fact have the rights to the content that Meta was considering licensing, per a transcript.
“I’d like to point out that the — in the fiction category, we quickly learned from the business development team that most of the publishers we were talking to, they themselves were representing that they did not have, actually, the rights to license the data to us,” Choudhury said. “And so it would take a long time to engage with all their authors.”"
