Google is accused of illegally using copyrighted content and stealing the personal information of millions of Americans to train its AI products.
The allegations were made in a proposed class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco on Tuesday by eight people, who say they are seeking to represent the millions of affected Internet users.
If Google is found guilty of violating federal privacy and consumer protection laws, it could owe at least $5 billion in damages.
Why we care Marketers are widely encouraged to embrace AI and implement technologies such as ChatGPT and Bard into their strategies. However, if AI products are being developed with content and data that has been taken illegally, this could be problematic as it risks potential copyright issues.
What has Google allegedly done? The plaintiffs allege that Google has:
It has been illegally taking digital content created and shared by millions of Americans. I’ve been using this private property to train their AI technology, including their chatbot, Bard. It stole “virtually our entire digital footprint,” including “creative and written works” to develop its AI product catalog.
The eight plaintiffs have accused Google of taking a variety of content they shared on social media without permission, from photos on dating websites to playlists saved on Spotify and videos uploaded to TikTok.
One of the plaintiffs, who describes himself as a best-selling author from Texas, specifically accused Google of copying a book they wrote in its entirety to form Bard.
Who sues Google? There are eight plaintiffs who remain anonymous and are known only by their initials.
The lawsuit was filed by Clarkson Law Firm against Google, its parent company Alphabet and Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind. If Clarkson Law Firm looks familiar, that’s because it’s the same company that filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI last month.
What do plaintiffs want? The plaintiffs want Google to give its users the option to opt out of its “unlawful data collection.” They also ask the search engine to delete its existing data catalog; otherwise, they say Google should pay the owners of that content “fair compensation.”
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What have the plaintiffs said? Ryan Clarkson, managing partner of Clarkson Law Firm, issued a statement:
“Google collected this data secretly for years, without notifying anyone, much less with anyone’s consent. “Google does not own the Internet, it does not own our creative works, it does not own our expressions of ourselves, pictures of our families and children, or anything else simply because we share it online.”
Tim Giordano, an attorney working on behalf of the plaintiffs at Clarkson Law Firm, said CNN:
“Google must understand that ‘publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose. “Our personal information and data is our property and valuable, and no one has the right to take it and use it for any purpose. .”
What did Google say? Google has denied the claims and called the lawsuit “baseless.” In a statement, Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado said:
“We have been clear for years that we use data from public sources, such as information published on the open web and public datasets, to train the AI models behind services like Google Translate, responsibly and in accordance with our principles of AI”. “U.S. law supports the use of public information to create new beneficial uses, and we look forward to refuting these baseless claims.”
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