Two neuroscientists filed a lawsuit against Apple in California federal court, alleging the company improperly used thousands of copyrighted books to train its Apple Intelligence AI model.
Reuters:
Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, professors at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York, told the court, opens new tab in a proposed class action on Thursday that Apple used illegal “shadow libraries” of pirated books to train Apple Intelligence.
The lawsuit is one of many high-stakes cases brought by copyright owners such as authors, news outlets, and music labels against tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms, over the unauthorized use of their work in AI training. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit from another group of authors over the training of its AI-powered chatbot Claude in August.
According to the complaint, Apple utilized datasets comprising thousands of pirated books as well as other copyright-infringing materials scraped from the internet to train its AI system.
The lawsuit said that the pirated books included Martinez-Conde and Macknik’s “Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles” and “Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions.”
The professors requested an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order for Apple to stop misusing their copyrighted work.
MacDailyNews Note: In early September, Apple was sued by authors alleging use of copyrighted books in its AI training.
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Why do we keep using the word “train” for Ai? Ai doesn’t “train” or “learn”, it stores pirated/stolen data. We are talking full files, not snippets.
When you ask Ai to make an image of The Shawshank Redemption, it doesn’t create something from memory of “watching” the movie, it’s pulling frames from the illegally stolen ShawshankRedemptionMovie.mp4 file that it has stored on its giant server farm.
I’m tired of our society beating around the bush using these stupid terms to soften the blow and twist the truth of what’s really happening.
I totally agree with iMack and would add that the times I’ve played around with ChatGPT and musks grok ( stupid name) and they all look have been pretty crap and occasionally bizarre. AI will get better but at this stage I wouldn’t use it for anything other than mucking around.