Just a month after being hit with one lawsuit, Apple is now facing another, with a new group of authors claiming the company used pirated books to train its artificial intelligence. This latest proposed class-action lawsuit comes from two neuroscience professors who say Apple used their copyrighted works without permission.
The professors, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, allege that Apple trained its AI models by scraping “shadow libraries”—websites that offer access to pirated books. This is the same accusation that was made in the previous lawsuit filed against Apple last month.
Apple is not alone in facing these kinds of legal challenges. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is also being sued by The New York Times for similar copyright infringement claims. The legal battles are a major headache for the tech giants, who have poured billions into developing their powerful AI models.
There is already a major precedent in this new legal territory. Earlier this year, the AI company Anthropic settled a similar class-action lawsuit by agreeing to pay a massive $1.5 billion to the 500,000 authors involved in the case. That huge settlement is a clear sign that these lawsuits pose a real financial threat to the tech companies. As the lawsuits continue to pile up, it’s becoming clear that the fight over who owns the data used to train AI is far from over.
