Three writers have filed a complaint against Nvidia, accusing the company of unlawfully exploiting their copyrighted literary works as training material for its AI system NeMo, without obtaining the necessary approval.
Brian Kin, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart Ounan stated that their works were part of a comprehensive dataset of around 196,640 books, which contributed to teaching the NeMo system how to simulate written texts conventionally, and these works were removed in October due to complaints of intellectual property rights violation.
In a class-action lawsuit filed against the company operating the AI systems in the Federal Court of San Francisco, the plaintiffs claimed that the removal indicated Nvidia’s acknowledgment of training NeMo on the dataset without permission, thereby breaching copyright.
The complaint alleges that the publications were included in records known as “The Pile,” containing a compilation of books called “Books3,” and Nvidia admitted to using “The Pile” and “Books3” to train AI models known as NeMo Megatron.
The lawsuit seeks unlimited compensation for individuals in the United States who contributed their protected works to the development of advanced linguistic models for the NeMo platform over the past three years.
The lawsuit includes a collection of works, such as the novel “Journey of the Ghost,” published in 2008, along with the novel “Like a Love Story” released in 2019, as well as the novel “The Last Night in Lobster” from 2007.
The lawsuit filed against Nvidia adds to a growing series of cases against tech companies for exploiting copyrighted materials in training generative AI technologies, capable of producing new content based on various inputs such as texts, images, and audio clips.
Nvidia markets the NeMo platform as a cost-effective and efficient tool for adopting generative AI.
OpenAI and its partner Microsoft are among the companies facing legal actions related to this technology.
Nvidia, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, has become the preferred choice for investors due to increasing interest in the field of artificial intelligence.
It has played a crucial role as a leading company in manufacturing the electronic chips essential for AI, leading to a nearly 600% increase in its stock value since the end of 2022, resulting in its market value reaching approximately 2.2 trillion dollars.
