Google was hit with a lawsuit on Tuesday that accused the tech giant of "secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet" in order to train its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard. The complaint, filed in San Francisco federal court by eight individuals seeking to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders, said Google's unauthorised scraping of data from websites violated their privacy and property rights, according to a report in Independent. The suit covers Google, its parent company Alphabet and Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind.
"Personal data of every kind, especially conversational data between humans, is critical to the AI training process," the lawsuit alleged.
The complaint also claims that Google has even taken "creative and copywritten works" to build its AI products.
"Google does not own the internet, it does not own our creative works, it does not own our expressions of our personhood, pictures of our families and children, or anything else simply because we share it online," the plaintiffs' attorney Ryan Clarkson said in a statement.
In response, Google's general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado was quoted as saying by news agency Reuters that the company has been "clear for years that we use data from public sources - like information published to the open web and public datasets - to train the AI models behind services like Google Translate, responsibly and in line with our AI principles".
"American law supports using public information to create new beneficial uses, and we look forward to refuting these baseless claims," DeLaine Prado said.
The company also updated its online privacy policy earlier this month, stating that it can use publicly available data to train its AI tools.
But the lawsuit alleged that the change was designed to "double-down on its position that everything on the internet is fair game for the company to take for private gain and commercial use, including to build and enhance AI products like Bard".
The case is one of several filed since last year against companies in the booming AI industry, including Meta Platforms, Microsoft and OpenAI, over their alleged misuse of personal data and copyrighted books, visual art and source code to train their systems.
