Microsoft has become the latest tech firm to be sued for alleged copyright infringement involving their artificial intelligence systems.
The Guardian reported that a group of authors, including Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent, have filed a lawsuit in a federal court in New York, alleging Microsoft of using nearly 200,000 pirated books to create an artificial intelligence (AI) model.
Specifically, the authors allege that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its Megatron AI to respond to human prompts. Megatron AI is an algorithm that produces text, music, images and videos in response to users’ prompts.
Author lawsuit
The authors in their complaint allege Microsoft used the pirated data to create a “computer model that is not only built on the work of thousands of creators and authors, but also built to generate a wide range of expression that mimics the syntax, voice, and themes of the copyrighted works on which it was trained.”
The authors, according to the Guardian, have requested a court order blocking Microsoft’s alleged infringement, and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work that Microsoft allegedly misused.
To create these models, software engineers amass enormous databases of media to program the AI to produce similar output, the Guardian reported.
Spokespeople for Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. An attorney for the authors declined to comment, the Guardian reported.
AI lawsuits
There has been a number of high profile lawsuits against tech firms and AI players in recent years, filed by copyright holders alleging some form of copyright infringement.
Tech companies have argued that they make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content, and that being forced to pay copyright holders for their work could hamstring the burgeoning AI industry.
But copyright holders have alleged that AI firms have exploited their material to train their AI systems.
Earlier this week Meta had won the backing of a judge in a copyright lawsuit, after a group of authors, including the the comedian Sarah Silverman had sued both Meta Platforms and OpenAI back in July 2023.
A day or so before that in another lawsuit from authors, Judge William Alsup had ruled that Anthropic’s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative” since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style.”
