Google Faces Class-Action Lawsuit for Allegedly Stealing Data to Train Its AI
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Google, accusing the search giant of illegally obtaining and using copyrighted works and personal data from millions of internet users. The suit comes after Google updated its AI privacy policy, which states that the company has the right to scrape all publicly available information on the internet to fuel its artificial intelligence projects.
Clarkson, the law firm behind the case, argues that Google does not have ownership over the internet or the content shared on it. Ryan Clarkson, managing partner of Clarkson, states that Google has been taking everything created or shared online, including personal and professional works, to train and build commercial AI products.
This lawsuit follows a similar case against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, filed by the same law firm. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard rely on scraping vast amounts of public information from the internet. Companies like Google feed this data into their AI systems, which then produce new content based on what they have learned. This raises the question of whether it is legal for a private company to use information from the internet in the same way that a human would when generating new content.
The complaint asserts that Google violated copyright law and collected personal information without consent. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, who are identified only by their initials, include a New York Times best-selling author, a six-year-old boy, a software developer, a TikTok influencer, an actor, and several others.
In response to the complaint, Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s General Counsel, states that the company has been clear about its use of publicly available information to train AI models. Prado contends that American law supports using public information for beneficial purposes and dismisses the claims as baseless.
While Google’s AI data harvesting was not a secret, its privacy policy used to mention that it utilized publicly available information to enhance language models such as Google Translate. However, the lawsuit argues that Google secretly harvested this data for years without anyone’s knowledge or consent.
The lawsuit seeks $5 million in damages and asks the court to impose a temporary freeze on the commercial use of Google’s AI technology until proper safeguards are in place. Additionally, it demands that data dividends be paid to every individual whose information was used to develop Google’s AI.
In conclusion, Google finds itself facing a class-action lawsuit that alleges the company stole copyrighted works and personal data from internet users. The lawsuit raises questions about the legality of using publicly available information to train AI models. As the case unfolds, it remains to be seen how the court will address these concerns and determine the outcome of the lawsuit.
