On Tuesday, Google was sued for “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet” in order to train its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard. According to the Independent, the complaint, filed in federal court in San Francisco by eight persons attempting to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders, said that Google’s unauthorized scraping of data from websites infringed their privacy and property rights. Google, Alphabet, and Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind are also included in the claim.
“Personal data of every kind, especially conversational data between humans, is critical to the AI training process,” the lawsuit alleged. According to the complaint, Google has even used “creative and copywritten works” to construct its AI products. “Google does not own the internet, it does not own our creative works, it does not own our expressions of our personhood, pictures of our families and children, or anything else simply because we share it online,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Ryan Clarkson said in a statement.
Google’s general counsel defends using public data for AI models
Google’s general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, responded by saying that the company has been “clear for years that we use data from public sources – like information published to the open web and public datasets – to train the AI models behind services like Google Translate, responsibly and in line with our AI principles.” “American law supports using public information to create new beneficial uses, and we look forward to refuting these baseless claims,” DeLaine Prado said.
Earlier this month, the business also amended its online privacy policy, noting that it can utilize publicly available data to train its AI systems. However, according to the lawsuit, the modification was made to “double-down on its position that everything on the internet is fair game for the company to take for private gain and commercial use, including to build and enhance AI products like Bard.”
