Publishers and writers collectively sued Google for misappropriating copyrighted content to train Gemini, and internal documents warned of the risk of hundreds of billions of fines. A group of publishers and writers have filed a class action lawsuit against Google, accusing it of using copyrighted works to train AI platform Gemini without authorization.

Publishers and writers collectively sued Google for misappropriating copyrighted content to train Gemini, and internal documents warned of the risk of a hundred billion fine. A group of publishers and writers have filed a class action lawsuit against Google, accusing it of using copyrighted works to train the AI ​​platform Gemini without authorization. The plaintiffs include Hachette Livre, Cengage Group, Elsevier, writer Scott Turow and S.C.R.I.B.E., etc. The lawsuit also accuses Google of deliberately deleting or modifying the copyright information in the work to "hide the fact that the Gemini model was trained based on stolen data." Google is accused of using Google Books and Play Store collections to train AI. The lawsuit documents point out that publishers and authors have provided copyrighted works to Google for a long time in the past in order to make books searchable through Google Books. However, the search results only provide limited text fragments and directory information, and users cannot view the entire book. However, the plaintiff believes that Google later used copies of these books to train the Gemini model, and also used the content of the books uploaded to the Google Play Store for training, although it never obtained relevant authorization. Google's internal documents cited by the plaintiff show that Google itself has realized that using copyrighted books to train AI may cause "serious problems" and face "potential fines of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars." The "fair use" defense remains controversial, and Anthropic has been fined $1.5 billion. This lawsuit is one of many filed by copyright holders against AI companies. Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all facing similar disputes. Two early rulings by California courts in the United States tended to support AI companies, holding that the use of copyrighted content to train AI models could be considered "fair use." However, Anthropic was fined US$1.5 billion for misappropriating copyrighted works when training AI, becoming the largest compensation in the history of US copyright law. About 500,000 authors are eligible to receive at least US$3,000 each. The lawsuit against Google was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which means another judge will have the opportunity to express different opinions on whether AI training is fair use. Google has not yet responded to a request for comment. via AI News (author: AI Base)