AI training class action lawsuit overview:
- Who: Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, authors David Kinnaman, Tsh Oxenreider, Lysa Terkeurst, John Blase and the Relevate Group filed a class action lawsuit against Meta Platforms, Bloomberg, Microsoft, and The EleutherAI Institute.
- Why: Huckabee and the authors claim Meta, Bloomberg and Microsoft trained their large language learning models using a dataset created by EleutherAI that allegedly contained information scraped from approximately 183,000 pirated ebooks.
- Where: The class action lawsuit was filed in New York federal court.
Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Bloomberg knowingly used pirated ebooks to train their large language models (LLMs), a type of artificial intelligence designed to understand and generate human language, a new class action lawsuit alleges.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and a group of authors claim Meta, Microsoft, and Bloomberg trained their LLMs using a dataset released by EleutherAI that contained information scraped from around 183,000 pirated ebooks.
Huckabee and the authors argue Meta, Microsoft, and Bloomberg trained their LLMs with the “full knowledge and understanding that the datasets they were using to train their LLMs were assembled from copyrighted works.”
“Microsoft, Meta, and Bloomberg chose to train their LLMs using pirated and stolen works for the purpose of making a profit,” the AI training class action states.
Huckabee and the authors want to represent a nationwide class of individuals that own a US copyright in any work that was used as training data for Meta, Microsoft, and Bloomberg’s LLMs since October 2020.
Microsoft, Meta, Bloomberg neither sought or obtained licenses to use copyright work to train their LLMs, says class action
Huckabee and the group of authors argue Microsoft, Meta, and Bloomberg did not attempt to legally use the copyrighted works found in the dataset — called “Books3” — to train their LLMs.
“None of the Defendants sought or obtained licenses to use the copyrighted works from Books3, and the Defendants knew that the parties responsible for assembling Books3 were not licensed, or otherwise legally permitted, to disseminate those works,” the AI training class action states.
Microsoft and Meta used Books3 to train their LLaMa language model, while Bloomberg used it to train its BloombergGPT LLM, according to the AI training class action.
Huckabee and the authors claim Meta, Microsoft, Bloomberg, and EleutherAI are guilty of unjust enrichment, negligence, and conversion, and vicarious and direct copyright infringement, and of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The plaintiffs are demanding a jury trial and requesting declaratory and injunctive relief along with an award of statutory, punitive and other damages for themselves and all class members.
In other news involving AI, a federal judge sided against an AI researcher in August who argued the U.S. Copyright Office should not have been allowed to reject their copyright application for a computer-generated image.
Have you had your copyright work ? Let us know in the comments!
The plaintiffs are represented by Greg G. Gutzler, Adam J. Levitt, Amy E. Keller and James A. Ulwick of DiCello Levitt LLP, Seth Haines, Timothy Hutchinson and Lisa Geary of RMP LLP and Scott Poynter of Poynter Law Group.
The AI training class action lawsuit is Huckabee, et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al., Case No. 1:23-cv-09152, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
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