Google has to answer in court for the unauthorized use of data for artificial intelligence (AI) training. The Alphabet subsidiary used personal and copyrighted information, according to an indictment published in San Francisco on Tuesday (local time).
The plaintiffs say they represent millions of Internet users and copyright owners. They are demanding damages of at least five billion dollars. “Google doesn’t own the internet, it doesn’t own our creative works, it doesn’t own our expressions of ourselves, the pictures of our families and children, or anything else just because we share it online,” said Ryan Clarkson, attorney for the Accusation.
Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s chief legal officer, pointed out that the Internet company has been evaluating information from publicly accessible sources for years. “American law permits the use of public information to create new useful uses.” Last month, several authors sued OpenAI because Microsoft’s participation in training its AI ChatGPT had used their works without permission.
The prominent US comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors raise similar allegations in a separate lawsuit against OpenAI and Facebook parent Meta, which also developed an AI.