On Tuesday, the Clarkson Law Firm filed the proposed class action lawsuit against Google, Alphabet, and Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind in a federal court in California. The firm had brought a comparable lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, last month. (OpenAI previously ignored a request for comment regarding the lawsuit.)
Google “has been secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans,” according to the complaint, and utilizing this information to train its AI products, such as its chatbot Bard. Additionally, according to the complaint, Google used “creative and copywritten works,” as well as “virtually the entirety of our digital footprint,” to create its AI-based products.
Upon request for comment, representatives from Google, Alphabet, and DeepMind did not respond immediately.
The complaint brings attention to Google’s updated privacy policy which now allows the use of publicly available information for the training of their AI models and tools like Bard.
The company stated in response to a previous Verge report on the upgrade that it has always been clear that Google trains language models for services like Google Translate using data that is readily accessible to the general public on the internet. Newer services like Bard are also included, as this most recent update only clarifies.
The case is filed at a time in which a new generation of AI tools has drawn a lot of attention recently for their capacity to produce written and visual content in response to user input. By training on enormous amounts of web data, the massive language models that underpin this new technology are able to accomplish this. However, as a result of copyright concerns from the works included in these data sets as well as their apparent exploitation of private and potentially sensitive information from regular users, including information from children, firms are also coming under increasing legal scrutiny, according to the Google lawsuit.
Tim Giordano, one of the lawyers at Clarkson who are suing Google, said in an interview with CNN that ““Google needs to understand that ‘publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose. “Our personal information and our data is our property, and it’s valuable, and nobody has the right to just take it and use it for any purpose.”
The lawsuit is requesting a temporary halt on commercial use and development of Google’s generative AI tools, specifically Bard, as well as seeking financial compensation for individuals whose data was allegedly misused. The firm has identified eight plaintiffs, including a minor. Giordano highlighted the difference between Google’s usual indexing practices and the new accusations of data scraping for the purpose of training AI tools.
Google’s search engine can drive purchases and engagement through attributed links, but scraping data for AI training alters incentives for purchasing. While people may expect their digital data to be used for search results or targeted ads, using it for AI training was unexpected.
A partner at the legal firm, Ryan Clarkson, stated that Google must “create an opportunity for folks to opt-out” of having their data used to train AI while still allowing them to access the internet for regular purposes.
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