Google has filed a motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit accusing the tech giant of violating privacy and property rights by using scraped data to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Filed on October 17 in a California District Court, the company asserted that utilising publicly available data does not constitute "stealing", as the plaintiffs allege.
The lawsuit, initiated in July by eight individuals purporting to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders, claims Google’s policy change a week prior to the filing enabled the data scraping activities.
Detrimental to AI
The plaintiffs argue this violated their privacy and property rights. Google responded that such a lawsuit would be detrimental not only to its services but also to the broader concept of generative AI.
Google's stance is that the complaint fails to address core issues, notably how the plaintiffs have been directly harmed by the use of their data.
The company criticised the suit for focusing on "irrelevant conduct by third parties and doomsday predictions about AI".
This case adds to a growing list of legal challenges faced by tech companies involved in AI development.
On September 20, Meta also denied allegations of copyright infringement related to the training of its AI systems.