Google faces lawsuit alleging data scraping and copyright violations for AI development

Google was hit with a far-reaching lawsuit on Tuesday that accuses the tech giant of scraping data from millions of users without their consent and violating copyright laws to train and develop its artificial intelligence (AI) products. The proposed class action suit, filed in a federal court in California by Clarkson Law Firm, targets Google, its parent company Alphabet, and Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind. It's worth noting that Clarkson Law Firm previously filed a similar suit against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, last month.

According to a CNN report, the complaint alleges that Google has engaged in secretive data theft, claiming that the company has been unlawfully extracting and utilising everything ever created and shared on the internet by millions of Americans. The lawsuit further asserts that Google has exploited this data to train its AI products, including the chatbot Bard, and has taken possession of the entirety of users' digital footprints, including creative and copyrighted works, for the development of its AI technologies.

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The complaint highlights a recent update to Google's privacy policy, which explicitly states that the company may employ publicly accessible information to train its AI models and tools, such as Bard. In response to a previous report on the policy update by The Verge, Google clarified that their policy has always been transparent about the use of publicly available information from the open web to train language models for services like Google Translate, and the update merely extends this to newer services like Bard.

This lawsuit arises at a time when a new generation of AI tools has gained significant attention for their capacity to generate written content and images in response to user prompts. However, the extensive reliance on large language models in this technology has attracted legal scrutiny regarding copyright concerns related to the incorporation of works within these data sets, as well as the potential utilisation of personal and sensitive data from ordinary users, including children, as indicated in the Google lawsuit.

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Tim Giordano, one of the attorneys from Clarkson Law Firm involved in the lawsuit against Google, emphasised that "publicly available" does not imply free to use for any purpose. He stated in an interview with CNN, "Our personal information and our data are our property, and it's valuable, and nobody has the right to just take it and use it for any purpose."

The lawsuit aims to obtain injunctive relief, requesting a temporary halt on the commercial access and development of Google's generative AI tools such as Bard. In addition, it calls for unspecified damages and financial compensation to be paid to individuals, including a minor, whose data was allegedly misappropriated by Google. The firm has identified eight plaintiffs who are part of this legal action.

Giordano distinguished the benefits and alleged harms of how Google typically indexes online data for its core search engine from the new allegations of data scraping for AI training purposes. While Google's search engine directs users to attributed links that can drive engagement and potentially lead to purchases, scraping data for AI training creates an alternative version of the work, significantly altering incentives for users to purchase it.

He said that although some internet users may have grown accustomed to their digital data being collected and used for search results or targeted advertising, the same cannot be assumed for AI training. He also underlined that "people could not have imagined their information would be used this way."

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