Google faces lawsuit over copyright infringement, data scraping for AI expansion

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OpenAI in June. Clarkson's firm asked the court to allow the plaintiffs to remain anonymous in both cases, citing violent threats reportedly received by individuals filing similar lawsuits The lawsuit filed on Tuesday claims that the company could owe at least $5 billion.

Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said, "The company has been clear for years that we use data from public sources — like information published to the open web and public datasets – to train the AI models behind services like Google Translate, responsibly and in line with our AI Principles." DeLaine further stressed that American law supports using public information to create new beneficial uses, and, “we look forward to refuting these baseless claims." The case is one of several filed since last year against companies in the booming AI industry, including Meta Platforms, Microsoft and OpenAI, over their alleged misuse of personal data and copyrighted books, visual art and source code to train their systems. The eight plaintiffs in Tuesday's lawsuit, identified by their initials, said Google misused content they posted to social media and information shared on Google platforms to train its chatbot Bard and other generative AI systems, Reuters reported.

The content identified in the lawsuit ranged from photos on dating websites to Spotify playlists and TikTok videos. One of the plaintiffs, J.L., described as a best-selling Texan author and investigative journalist, said Google also copied her book in full to train Bard.