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What Happened: Google found itself at the center of a class-action lawsuit filed by the Clarkson Law Firm in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The lawsuit accused the tech giant, along with its AI sister company DeepMind and parent company Alphabet, of engaging in covert data collection without the knowledge or consent of millions of U.S. citizens.
The lawsuit alleged that Google had secretly harvested vast amounts of personal and professional information, including creative works, photographs, emails, and digital footprints, to train its generative AI products such as the chatbot Bard.
"It has very recently come to light that Google has been secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans," the lawsuit read.
The complaint, seeking class-action status, claimed that Google clandestinely gathered data from subscription-based websites as well as platforms known for hosting pirated collections of books and creative works.
The lawsuit also highlighted a recent update to Google's privacy policy, which explicitly stated the company's intention to collect "publicly available online" information for training its AI models.
In a statement given to Reuters, Google referred to the claims made in the lawsuit as "baseless." The company's general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, stated that Google had been transparent for years about its use of data from public sources, including information published on the open web and public datasets, to train its AI models responsibly and in accordance with its AI Principles.
Why It's Important: This lawsuit followed another complaint filed by the Clarkson Law Firm against OpenAI, alleging similar data theft for training its AI language model chatGPT.
One of the plaintiffs in the Google lawsuit, identified as "J.L.," was described as a New York Times best-selling author and investigative journalist residing in Texas.
She alleged that Google had used a stolen PDF of her book to train Bard, resulting in the unauthorized availability of her work on the AI platform. Bard reportedly provided chapter summaries and even shared verbatim extracts from her book, reported Business Insider.
