"Google hit with class-action lawsuit over AI data scraping", 12 July 2023

Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) was accused in a proposed class action lawsuit on Tuesday of misusing vast amounts of personal information and copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence systems.

The complaint, filed in San Francisco federal court by eight individuals seeking to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders, said Google's unauthorized scraping of data from websites violated their privacy and property rights...

[The plaintiff's attorney]'s firm filed a similar lawsuit in the same court against Microsoft-backed OpenAI in June. It 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."

"American law supports using public information to create new beneficial uses, and we look forward to refuting these baseless claims," DeLaine Prado said.

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.

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.

The lawsuit asked the court to order Google to let internet users opt out of Google's "illicit data collection" and to delete the existing data or pay its owners "fair compensation."...