On Tuesday, Google was sued for allegedly stealing data from millions of users without their consent and violating copyright laws to train and develop its AI products.
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On Tuesday, the Clarkson law firm filed a proposed class action lawsuit in California federal court against Google, parent company Alphabet , and subsidiary DeepMind over artificial intelligence . Prior to this lawsuit, the company filed a similar lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI last month.
The complaint alleges that Google secretly monitors and stores the content created and shared by millions of Americans online and uses it to train its artificial intelligence products, such as the Bard chatbot. The complaint alleges that Google has stored nearly all of our digital data, including creative and written works, to create its AI products.
Halimah DeLaine Prado , Google's general counsel, dismissed the lawsuit's claims as "baseless." "We've been clear for years that we use data from public sources — like information published on the open web and public datasets — to train the AI models behind services like Google Translate, responsibly and in accordance with our AI principles," DeLaine Prado said.
"US law supports the use of public information to create new beneficial uses, and we look forward to refuting these baseless allegations," the statement added.
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The complaint concerns Google's recently updated privacy policy. According to the updated policy, the company has the right to use publicly available information to train its artificial intelligence tools like Bard.
In response to a previous Verge report about the update, the company said its policy "has long been transparent" about this practice and "this latest update simply clarifies that newer services like Bard are also included."
The lawsuit comes as a new collection of artificial intelligence tools has attracted a lot of attention in recent months for their ability to generate written works and images in response to user instructions. The new technology relies on large language models that can be trained on vast amounts of data found online.
During data processing, companies review legal issues of intellectual property and also examine the use of personal and sensitive data from users, including children, in accordance with the lawsuit.
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While users may accept that their data is being used for ads and targeted advertising, the use of their information for training artificial intelligence is something they could not have foreseen. In addition to seeking injunctive relief to freeze commercial access and development of Google's artificial intelligence tools, the lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and monetary compensation for individuals whose data was allegedly misused.
