Why Facebook-parent Meta may face same ‘AI copying’ problem as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Microsoft

Facebook parent Meta’s newest AI model, Llama 3.1, has been found to replicate passages from well-known books, including Harry Potter, far more frequently than anticipated, as per a new report which also says that many of these works remain under copyright. Researchers claim that the AI has memorised roughly 42% of the first Harry Potter book and can accurately reproduce 50-word sections about half the time. The study, conducted by experts from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University, examined how five leading AI models processed the Books3 dataset, which includes thousands of copyrighted titles.

“Llama 3.1 70B—a mid-sized model Meta released in July 2024—is far more likely to reproduce Harry Potter text than any of the other four models, the researchers found.