A group of authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, and Daniel Okrent, have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging that the company used pirated digital versions of their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model. The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, claims that Microsoft utilized a dataset comprising nearly 200,000 pirated books to develop a language algorithm capable of generating responses that closely mimic the syntax, voice, and themes of the original copyrighted works. (reuters.com)
This legal action is part of a broader trend where authors, news outlets, and other copyright holders are suing tech companies over the alleged misuse of their material in AI training. Similar lawsuits have been filed against Meta Platforms, Anthropic, and Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Notably, this case follows a recent California federal court ruling that declared Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI systems as fair use under U.S. copyright law, though the company could still be liable for pirating the books. (reuters.com)
The authors are seeking a court injunction to halt Microsoft's actions and are demanding statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work. As of now, Microsoft has not publicly commented on the allegations. (reuters.com)
This lawsuit underscores the growing tension between content creators and technology companies over the use of copyrighted material in training AI models. The outcome of this case could have significant implications for the future of AI development and the protection of intellectual property rights.
Source: NewsBytes Authors sue Microsoft for using their books to train AI