Harsa Maduranga/iStock via Getty Images
A group of authors is suing Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), claiming the tech giant used their books without permission to train its Megatron AI model.
A lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court on Tuesday, claims that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) used pirated digital versions of books by authors Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, and Daniel Okrent, among others to train the company’s AI model, which uses algorithms to give text responses to written prompts.
Bird, Tolentino and the other plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft used about 200,000 books without authorization to train Megatron 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.”
They have requested a court order blocking Microsoft from using their materials and compensation for statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work allegedly misused.
This is one of the several cases brought by writers, news outlets, and copyright holders against big tech companies such as Meta (META), Anthropic and OpenAI for misuse of copyrighted material in AI training.
On Tuesday, a California federal judge ruled that Anthropic did not violate copyright law of works by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.