According to Cointelegraph, Google is attempting to dismiss a proposed class-action lawsuit that alleges the company is violating the privacy and property rights of millions of internet users by scraping data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. Google filed the motion on October 17 in a California District Court, arguing that it is necessary to use public data to train its AI chatbots, such as Bard, and that the claims are based on false premises that it is 'stealing' publicly shared information on the internet.
Google stated that using publicly available information to learn is not stealing, nor is it an invasion of privacy, conversion, negligence, unfair competition, or copyright infringement. The company added that such a lawsuit would 'take a sledgehammer not just to Google's services but to the very idea of generative AI.' The suit was filed against Google in July by eight individuals claiming to represent millions of class members, including internet users and copyright holders. They allege that their privacy and property rights were violated under a Google privacy policy change a week before the suit was filed, which allows data scraping for AI training purposes.
Google countered that the complaint concerns 'irrelevant conduct by third parties and doomsday predictions about AI' and fails to address any core issues, particularly how the plaintiffs have been harmed by using their information. This case is one of many that have been brought against tech giants developing and training AI systems. On September 20, Meta refuted claims of copyright infringement during the training of its AI.
