Google has been subject to a large-scale lawsuit claiming that the tech giant pulled data from millions of users without their consent and violated copyright laws in order to train and develop his AI products.
The proposed class action was brought against Google, its parent company Alphabet, and Google’s subsidiary DeepMind AI in a California federal court last Tuesday evening and was brought by Clarkson Law Firm. The company previously filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, last month. (OpenAI has never responded to a request for comment on the claim.)
The complaint alleges that Google “secretly stole everything created and shared online by hundreds of millions of Americans” and used this data to train its AI products, such as chatbot Bard, and the complaint also alleges that Google took our “almost entire digital footprint,” including “creative and advertising copy businesses” to build its AI products.
Google, Alphabet and DeepMind representatives did not promptly respond to a request for comment.
The complaint refers to a recent update of Google’s privacy policy that explicitly states that the company may use publicly available information to train its AI models and tools such as Bard.
In response to Verge's previous update report, the company said its policy "was long-standing transparent that Google uses publicly available information from the open web to train language models for services such as Google Translate. This latest update simply shows the inclusion of newer services like Bard '.
The lawsuit comes at a time when a new set of AI tools has received significant attention in recent months for its ability to create written works and images in response to user claims, the large language models that support this new technology are able to do so by training on a wide range of online data.
However, in this process, companies also conduct increased legal scrutiny on copyright issues from works surveyed in these datasets, as well as their apparent use of personal and potentially sensitive data from ordinary users, including data from children, according to Google a lawsuit.
Tim Giordano, an attorney at Clarkson who brought the lawsuit against Google, told CNN in an interview: “Google needs to understand that the term “is not intended to be free of use for any purpose.” “Our personal information and data are our property, and are valuable, and no one has the right to take it and use it for any purpose.”
The claim seeks injunctive relief in the form of a temporary freeze for commercial access to and commercial development of Google’s generating AI tools such as Bard. It also seeks unspecified damages and payments as monetary compensation to persons whose data is allegedly misappropriated by Google. The company says it has brought together eight claimants, including a minor.
Giordano compared the alleged benefits and damages of how Google catalogues online data to support its primary search engine with new claims that it is cancelling data for AI tool training.
He said that by using his search engine, Google could “provide a link attributed to your business that someone could pay to buy or deal with.” Giordano added that collecting data for AI tool training creates an “alternative version of work that radically changes incentives for anyone who needs to buy the business.”
While some Internet users are used to collecting and using their digital data for targeted search results or ads, it may not be the case for AI training. Giordano said: “People could not have imagined that their information would be used that way.”
