Chicken Soup for the Soul files lawsuit against Big Tech over AI training
Chicken Soup for the Soul files lawsuit against Big Tech over AI training
It complained that the firms downloaded bootleg copies of its books from ‘shadow libraries’
American book publisher Chicken Soup for the Soul has sued several Big Tech companies in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for allegedly misusing its content to train their artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
While targeting several biggies, Chicken Soup complained that Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity AI and XAI of Elon Musk used pirated copies of its books to teach their chatbots to respond to human prompts.
The suit was filed by Freedman Normand Friedland.
Earlier, the law firm filed a similar (ongoing) lawsuit against Big Tech companies on behalf of authors, including John Carreyrou.
In a statement, Kyle Roche, a partner at Freedman Normand Friedland, said, "The action holds major AI companies accountable for exploiting hundreds of copyrighted works, sourced from illicit databases, without permission. The message is clear: companies cannot build billion-dollar technologies on stolen creative expression."
Chicken Soup publishes a series of inspirational books under its name and has sold over 500 million copies worldwide.
It complained that the companies downloaded bootleg copies of its books from ‘shadow libraries’ to use in AI training.
The publisher added that its first-person narratives in "natural, conversational language that conveys emotion, moral reflection, and coherent storytelling in concise form" were uniquely suited to train AI to "replicate authentic human voice, narrative pacing, emotional tone, and story structure."
The complaint further said, "Instead of paying for that value or licensing access to these works, the defendants pilfered illegal copies and used those to build systems now worth many hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The lawsuit is among the many filed by authors, news outlets, and copyright owners against tech companies for using their work in training the models behind their chatbots.
Chicken Soup for the Soul was represented by Kyle Roche, Velvel Freedman and Alex Potter of Freedman Normand Friedland and Elizabeth Brannen, John Stokes, Bridget Asay, Christopher Rigali and Lauren Martin of Stris & Maher.
