Google Hit with Class Action Over Alleged Use of Private, Copyrighted Data to Train AI Chatbot Bard

New to ClassAction.org? Read our Newswire Disclaimer

A proposed class action alleges that in “blatant disregard for privacy, property, and copyright laws,” Google has secretly harvested and used millions of internet users’ data to train its various artificial intelligence (AI) products.

Want to stay in the loop on class actions that matter to you? Sign up for ClassAction.org’s free weekly newsletter here.

The 90-page lawsuit says that in developing AI-powered products such as chatbot Bard, Imagen, MusicLM, Duet AI and the yet-to-be-released Gemini system, defendants Google, subsidiary Google DeepMind and parent company Alphabet scraped virtually “everything ever created and shared on the internet” for years without obtaining consent or providing fair compensation.

According to the case, the defendants’ alleged mass theft and misappropriation of data involves the full extent of each internet user’s “digital footprint,” including any personal, medical and financial information shared online; Google searches; Gmail conversations and content posted to social media platforms. Google also illegally accessed content on restricted, subscription-based websites and infringed at least 200 million materials explicitly protected by copyright, the suit alleges.

“Most valuable to the Products is personal data of any kind, especially conversational data between humans, which is how the Products develop human-like communication capabilities,” the filing explains. “Creative and expressive works are equally valuable because that is how AI products learn to ‘create’ art.”

One of the suit’s eight plaintiffs, a New York Times best-selling author, claims the defendants took a stolen PDF of her award-winning book that had been posted on a website offering pirated content and fed it to Bard without her knowledge or consent.

“On demand, Bard will offer not only to summarize the book in detail, chapter by chapter, but it also offers to regenerate the text of her book verbatim,” the case says. “Defendants’ infringement thus radically alters the perceived incentives for anyone to purchase the book going forward, harming [the plaintiff] in the form of lost profits and otherwise.”

The filing describes that another plaintiff, a 13-year-old who uses Google’s search engine, Gmail, Google Hangouts, Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat, was unaware that the defendants would compile the information she shared on these platforms to fuel the responses Bard gives to strangers around the world.

The lawsuit points out that on July 1 of this year, three days after the makers of ChatGPT were hit with a proposed class action over their own alleged web-scraping operation, Google quietly updated its online privacy policy to disclose its exploitation of publicly available information to fuel its AI products. Concerningly, Google’s long overdue disclosure has essentially given the company “ownership rights over anything online” for its own private gain and commercial use, the complaint stresses.

“Google must understand, once and for all: it 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 filing scathes. “‘Publicly available’ has never meant free to use for any purpose.”

The suit looks to represent anyone in the United States whose personal information was accessed, collected, tracked, taken or used by Google without consent or authorization. The lawsuit also seeks to cover anyone in the United States who owns a United States copyright in any work that was used as training data for Google’s AI products.

Get class action lawsuit news sent to your inbox – sign up for ClassAction.org’s free weekly newsletter here.