Chip giant Nvidia sued by authors over AI use of copyrighted work

Nvidia has been sued by three authors who said that the company used their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform. According to a report by news agency Reuters, the authors Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O'Nan said that their works were part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to simulate ordinary written language, before being taken down in October "due to reported copyright infringement." Nvidia touts NeMo as a fast and affordable way to adopt generative AI.

The lawsuit drags Nvidia into a growing body of litigation by writers, as well as the New York Times, over generative AI, which creates new content based on inputs such as text, images and sounds.

In a proposed class action filed in San Francisco federal court, the authors said that the takedown reflects Nvidia's having "admitted" it trained NeMo on the dataset, and thereby infringed their copyrights.

Works claimed to be copied
Among the works covered by the lawsuit are Keene's 2008 novel "Ghost Walk," Nazemian's 2019 novel "Like a Love Story," and O'Nan's 2007 novella "Last Night at the Lobster."

They are seeking unspecified damages for people in the United States whose copyrighted works helped train NeMo's so-called large language models in the last three years. The authors argue Nvidia's removal is an admission of guilt and are suing for unspecified damages on behalf of all U.S. authors whose works were used in the past three years.

Other companies sued over the technology have included OpenAI and its partner Microsoft.