In most circumstances, it’s illegal for companies to use copyright-protected material to train their AI systems without permission or payment, a court said, while finding that a lawsuit from Sarah Silverman against Meta doesn’t present one of those cases.

A federal judge ruled that Meta ‘s unauthorized use of copyrighted works from Sarah Silverman and other authors to train generative AI models is a “fair use,” but warned that the practice may in many circumstances be illegal.

The authors alleged that Meta trained its AI models on their copyrighted works without permission, potentially violating copyright law.