Three writers have initiated legal action against chipmaker Nvidia, disrupting the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) by alleging that their copyrighted works were utilized without permission in Nvidia's AI platform, NeMo. Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O’Nan have raised concerns about their books being part of a dataset containing nearly 200,000 books that NeMo used for language generation training purposes.
Lawsuit Highlights
The authors claim that Nvidia's removal of the dataset in October 2023 following copyright infringement assertions is an implicit admission of wrongdoing. This incident sets a precedent that might lead to similar legal battles emerging as AI technologies become increasingly prevalent.
Legal Action Details
In their class-action lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court, the trio seeks unspecified damages on behalf of US authors whose copyrighted material may have contributed to the training of NeMo's language models over the past three years. Specific works such as Keene’s “Ghost Walk” (2008), Nazemian’s “Like a Love Story” (2019), and O’Nan’s “Last Night at the Lobster” (2007) were highlighted in the lawsuit as examples of allegedly misappropriated content.
Industry Implications
This legal dispute places Nvidia among a growing list of companies confronting legal challenges from content creators and major media entities like the New York Times. The core issue revolves around generative AI technology, which can generate new content by learning from existing text, images, and audio sources.
Nvidia has refrained from commenting on the matter as of the most recent reports, while the authors' legal representatives have yet to provide additional details in response to inquiries.
