Publishers and an author have filed a lawsuit against Google over its Gemini AI
Three major publishing houses and American author Scott Turow have filed a lawsuit against Google in federal court in New York. They accuse the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to train its Gemini artificial intelligence models.
The plaintiffs are seeking compensation, an order to stop using their works, and the destruction of all unauthorized copies used to train the AI.
The lawsuit was filed by publishers Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier, along with bestselling author Scott Turow.
The plaintiffs allege that Google used books that had been provided for use by Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar. According to them, the company had the right to use these works only within the scope of these services—for example, to display searchable excerpts or to sell e-books—but not to train commercial artificial intelligence models.
The lawsuit states that Google copied the books without the copyright holders’ permission and without paying compensation, even though company insiders were aware of the potential legal consequences.
The plaintiffs also claim that Google’s internal documents reveal discussions of potential fines ranging “from tens to hundreds of billions of dollars” for the use of texts provided by publishers for Google Play Books.
According to the publishers, the use of their works to train artificial intelligence harms authors and the entire publishing industry, as AI-generated content could compete with original books.
As an example, the lawsuit notes that Gemini can, in 20 minutes and for 39 cents, create “a 100-page mystery novel about a murder in a quiet seaside town full of secrets, which would replace the original copyrighted mystery novel that Gemini was trained on.”
“No publisher or author can compete with this,” the document emphasizes.
Among the books that, according to the plaintiffs, Google used without permission are Nora K. Jemisin’s novel *The Fifth Season* and Lemony Snicket’s *Who Could It Be at This Hour?*.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to order Google to pay compensation, prohibit the company from further using their works to train artificial intelligence models, and require it to destroy all unauthorized copies of the books used for these purposes.
Source: The Guardian
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence carried out a hacking attack during testing — Reuters.
Google’s AI Overview feature generates millions of incorrect answers every hour — NYT
As a reminder, Japan is replacing people with robots on a massive scale due to the demographic crisis.
Gemini will also introduce mental health monitoring following lawsuits.
