Apple sued by authors for using books to train AI
What's the story
Apple has been slapped with a lawsuit by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, who allege that the tech giant illegally used their copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The class action suit was filed in Northern California's federal court and accuses Apple of copying protected works without consent, credit, or compensation.
Profit accusation
Apple allegedly used copyrighted works without permission
The lawsuit claims that Apple has not made any effort to compensate the authors for their contributions to this "potentially lucrative venture." The plaintiffs allege that a known collection of pirated books was used by Apple to train its "OpenELM" large language models. Both Hendrix and Roberson have claimed their works were part of this pirated dataset.
Legal silence
Both sides yet to comment on the lawsuit
Apple and the plaintiffs' lawyers have yet to comment on the lawsuit. This case is just one of many similar ones from authors, news outlets, and others accusing major tech companies of infringing legal protections for their works. The growing number of such cases highlights a larger issue in the tech industry over intellectual property rights in the age of artificial intelligence.
Settlement news
Anthropic settled similar lawsuit for $1.5B
Notably, AI start-up Anthropic recently revealed that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit from authors, who accused the firm of using their books without permission to train its AI chatbot Claude. The settlement is being hailed as the biggest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, although Anthropic did not admit any liability in the agreement.