Two authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing them of using books to train artificial intelligence models without their consent to infringement. Plaintiffs Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson alleged that Apple used a dataset of pirated copyrighted books, including works from AI training. They said in their complaints that Applebot, the company's scraper, can “reach” “Shadow Libraries.” The lawsuit currently seeks class action circumstances as there are a large number of books and authors found in Shadow Libraries.
The main plaintiffs in the suit are Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, both of whom have multiple books by name. They said Apple, one of the world's largest companies, “didn't try to pay them for their contributions.” [the] Apple is “copying” plaintiffs' “copying copyrighted works” and “output competing and diluting the market for those works. This allows Apple Intelligence to have far fewer works.
This is just one of many lawsuits filed against companies developing generative AI technology. Openai faces several, including lawsuits New York Times and the oldest non-profit newsroom in the United States. In particular, humanity, the AI company behind Claude Chatbot, recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a collective copyright infringement complaint brought on by the author. Similar to this case, the writer also accused the company of having pirated books from online libraries to train AI technology. The 500,000 authors involved in the incident reportedly earn $3,000 per work.
