Two American writers, Grady Hendricks and Jennifer Roberson, have sued Apple for copyright infringement, Reuters reports. The plaintiffs claim that their works were used to train artificial intelligence without consent or payment.
The lawsuit alleges that Apple used a dataset that contained pirated copies of copyrighted books, including the plaintiffs' works. They say the Applebot tool could access so-called "shadow libraries" — online archives of unlicensed works.
The lawsuit aims to gain class action status because a large number of books by various authors have been found in such libraries. Hendricks and Roberson emphasize that Apple, as one of the largest companies in the world, has made no attempt to compensate for the use of their works, although these materials, in their opinion, increase the commercial value of Apple Intelligence technology.
The document states that the company's actions deprived authors of control over their own works, reduced the economic value of their work, and created an opportunity for Apple to make significant profits illegally.
Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, previously agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by writers who also alleged that pirated books were used to train the company's AI. As part of the deal, about 500,000 authors are set to receive $3,000 for each work.