Google is facing a class-action lawsuit for collecting public information to train its Bard AI chatbot.
On Tuesday, Clarkson Law Firm filed the lawsuit, which says the data collection violates privacy laws in California and amounts to larceny and copyright infringement.
“Google has taken all our personal and professional information, our creative and copywritten works, our photographs, and even our emails —virtually the entirety of our digital footprint— and is using it to build commercial artificial intelligence,” the lawsuit claims.
As evidence, the complaint cites Google's decision to amend its privacy policy to vaguely say it will use “publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models,” including Bard.
The change sparked public outrage, according to the lawsuit. “Even though Google had trampled on privacy rights before, declaring ownership over anything and everything on the internet seemed especially audacious and violative—because it is,” the complaint says.
In a statement, Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google General Counsel, said: "We’ve been clear for years that we use data from public sources—like information published to the open web and public datasets—to train the AI models behind services like Google Translate, responsibly and in line with our AI Principles. American law supports using public information to create new beneficial uses, and we look forward to refuting these baseless claims."
Clarkson Law Firm filed a similar lawsuit last month against ChatGPT’s developer OpenAI for the same alleged offense: scraping people’s data without their consent.
It's not clear what public data —whether it be websites, books, or social media posts— OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been trained on. However, Google used millions of websites, including Wikipedia, Coursera, and Scribd, to train AI chatbots, according to The Washington Post.
The class-action lawsuit against Google argues the company should be asking for permission and paying people to use their data to develop Bard and other AI programs. For example, the document claims the tech giant could be sourcing data from social media accounts from users, along with copyrighted books and personal blogs.
A former Google engineer also claims the company used Gmail data to train its large language models, although Google has denied this.
The lawsuit adds: “More fundamentally, 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 lawsuit is seeking damages and wants the tech giant to delete the collected data. In addition, Clarkson wants Google to pause all development on Bard until it establishes an independent council and other safeguards to ensure the responsible use of its AI programs.