CDM By CDM Staff
Google got smacked with a class-action lawsuit Tuesday accusing the search giant of “stealing everything ever shared on the internet,” including copyrighted works and millions of people’s personal data. The law firm behind the case, Clarkson, said the case comes after Google changed its AI privacy policy, an update first spotted by Gizmodo. The company changed its policy to say it reserves the right to scrape all the internet’s public information to fuel its artificial intelligence projects.
“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,” said Ryan Clarkson, managing partner of Clarkson, in a press release. “We have only recently learned that Google has been taking everything ever created or shared online by millions of internet users, including all our personal information, creative works, and professional works, and using all of that data to train and build commercial AI Products.”
The case comes after a nearly identical lawsuit against OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, which was filed by the same firm. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, not to mention countless other AI endeavors, are trained on the mountains of public information scraped off the internet. Companies like Google feed the data into their AI systems, and the AI produces “new” content based on what it learns.
So far, it’s up for debate, but the complaint says Google broke copyright law and collected people’s personal information without consent. The plaintiffs, known only by their initials in the lawsuit, include a New York Times best-selling author, a six-year-old boy, a software developer, a TikTok influencer, an actor, and several others…
