Joining the ever-growing list of companies being sued over generative AI and its blatant reliance on copyright infringement, primary AI hardware source Nvidia is now being sued by a collective of authors in a class action lawsuit, reportsReuters. While Nvidia’sNeMotechnology is pushed as a low-cost entry to AI, that seems to have come at the expense of the writers of the 196,640 books used in NeMo’s now-deleted training set.Three of those writers have come forward in the class action lawsuit: Brian Keene (Ghost Walk, 2008), Abdi Nazemian (Like a Love Story, 2019), and Stewart O’Nan (Last Night at the Lobster, 2007). The three books cited are also cited in the original lawsuit as material unfairly used by NeMo without compensation.This is not the first of themajor lawsuits relating to generative AIthat we’ve covered in recent history. There’s alsoThe New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoftand ourop-ed on the legal and ethical status of generative AI.As cutting-edge generative AI solutions likeSoraand the profits driven by it continue to grow, valid concerns about the legitimacy of that work likewise continues to grow. Intel andMicrosoftsay that we’ve entered the era ofAI PCs, but that doesn’t mean humans shouldn’t be compensated for the creative and professional contributions made with their finite, meaty lifespans.Unlike most of the other major ongoing lawsuits happening right now, this NeMo Nvidia lawsuit might be a little more interesting. Nvidia isn’t just a random company with an offending model, but is instead the primary purveyor of AI hardware that others are using for their AI model training. Considering the scale and publicity of Nvidia’sAI investments, profits, andshady market tactics, the outcome of this could be quite the gunshot for the era of no-citation, no-pay “generative” AI.Only time will tell what legal precedents will ultimately be set by all these ongoing cases relating to generative AI. Ethically, though, it seems rather clear that “intelligence” that can only function by taking everyone else’s work should probably be doing more than just printing money for its operators without accountability.
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Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
