Use Of Copyrighted Works: Nvidia Faces Lawsuit From Authors (Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash)

Nvidia is making headlines as three authors claim that the company used their books without their permission to train NeMo, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform. According to a Reuters report, the authors have also initiated legal proceedings against the renowned chipmaker.

As per the report, the three authors include Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O’Nan. The authors alleged that their works were included in a dataset of 196,640 books that were used to train the AI platform NeMo to simulate ordinary written language. The works were also reportedly taken down in October “due to reported copyright infringement.”

Reuters reported that the proposed class action lawsuit was filed by authors in San Francisco federal court last Friday. The authors also claim that the fact that the works were removed reflects Nvidia”s having “admitted” that it trained the AI platform on the dataset and thereby infringed their copyrights. The books that were reportedly used to train Nvidia”s NeMo include Brian Keene”s 2008 novel “Ghost Walk,” Nazemian”s 2019 novel “Like a Love Story,” and O”Nan”s 2007 novella “Last Night at the Lobster.” Notably, the lawsuit has not specified the damages the authors are seeking.

According to Nvidia, NeMo is an end-to-end, cloud-native framework to build, customise, and deploy generative AI models anywhere.

At the same time, a few other tech companies are also facing lawsuits over the use of copyrighted content in training AI models. In December 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI, claiming that the AI giant used millions of the newspaper’s articles without permission to help train the chatbots. However, the ChatGPT maker recently responded to this lawsuit and claimed that the New York Times “paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products.”

(With inputs from Reuters)