A group of publishers and author Scott Turow filed a class action lawsuit on Tuesday against Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that the tech giant illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted books and then used the works to train its AI model Llama. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, claims that Meta had approached publishers to license works, but on Zuckerberg’s “personal instruction,” they abandoned those negotiations “and stole the works instead.” “That path was more expedient for Meta, but it deprived publishers and authors of fair compensation and spurned established licensing markets,” the lawsuit stated. The lawsuit is only the latest litigation over the use of copyrighted works in AI models, something that tech companies have generally argued is a “fair use” under the Copyright Act. The plaintiffs in the case are Turow, Elsevier, Cengage Learning, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishing Group and McGraw Hill.…