The evening was organised by the 'Club de l'Audiovisuel', a club of French audio-visual firms that organises prizes for short productions and 'dîners-débats', with a speech during the starter course and questions after the main course. President is Patrick Bezier.
Laurent Solly, VP of Meta, has an impressive career behind him at Meta, in the private media sector, and in politics as one of the 'Sarkozy boys'.
Laurent gave an extremely convincing presentation on AI, albeit one-sided. He praised the speed and achievements of AI development and the 'gains in productivity', stating that those who miss this opportunity will be left behind in history. To demonstrate the rapid development and pinnacle of technological and artistic achievement, he showed three videos: one from an amateur on Instagram and two adverts. His favourite ended with the perfect image of a Perrier can bearing the perfect logo. He did not mention rights holders at any point, but he did give the fine example of an Algerian director who was able to make a "very touching short film" using AI without spending anything.
When challenged about creators being 'looted', he responded that, as he is not a creator himself, he was listening with 'humility', but added that this is 'a fascinating debate' with 'different opinions and an unsettled question'.
Questions of Sylvie:
Sylvie challenged Laurent on the fact that his presentation completely omitted to mention "datasets" in the production of AI output bearing the question whether Meta's business is model built on free data, and if not, how does Meta intend to remunerate the creators and producers of this data?
Having acknowledged the importance of the question, Laurent went on to answer that licences would be required for datasets, in fact a license agreement had been recently signed with Reuters, but that so far, Meta had only used 'public' data, which, he implied, is free to use.
The second question was why Meta had not signed the EU's Code of Practice, unlike all the other GPAI providers.
The answer was that Meta believed the AI Act was complicated enough - not even Siemens in Germany had signed it - and that 'clearer legislation' was needed.
All in all, Gilles and Sylvie came out of the meeting with the feeling that Laurent Solly as a representative of Meta was spreading a lot of alternative truths. Nevertheless it should be acknowledged that Meta is now revising its policy on copyright content and is looking at making deals.
(* Notably, article of 24th September
Meta in Talks for AI Content Licensing With Major Publishers )
The "Correspondance de la Presse" reported on the event. The text has been translated with the help of Deepl.
Note: Sylvie did not raise the issue of "financial transparency". This point was raised by Hervé RONY, director of the SCAM (collecting society for audio-visual authors).