Academics Sue Apple Over AI Training Copyright Violations

In September, the technology company Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with writers over pirated copies of their work that was used to train Anthropic’s Ai software. Anthropic was not the only tech company that used massive collections of books for training purposes — The Atlantic‘s Alex Reisner has gathered plenty of information on this very subject — and other lawsuits in a similar vein have been filed. (Full disclosure: several of my books are in one of these databases.)

New lawsuits are also in the works, including one targeting Apple for its use of a very specific work. Bloomberg Law‘s Aruni Soni reports that Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik, both faculty at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, have used the tech giant over claims that Apple trained its AI on their book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions.

“Apple did not compensate creators for use of their copyrighted works and concealed the sources of their training datasets to evade legal scrutiny,” the lawsuit states. “Apple continues to retain private AI training-data, including pirated books, to train its future models in various datasets without seeking Plaintiffs’ or Class members’ consent or providing them compensation.”

As their lawsuit points out, the plaintiffs’ book Sleights of Mind is part of the Books3 dataset. This collection of books is also at the center of another class action lawsuit directed at Apple, one which was filed in early September in the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division. Martinez-Conde and Macknik’s suit was filed in the San Jose division of the same district court.

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Both of these lawsuits are class action suits, which could have larger implications for their potential impact on the technology world. In a prescient 2023 article for WIRED, Kate Knibbs anticipated the potential for controversy around Books3. “All this increased scrutiny on data sets has made AI’s big players shy away from transparency,” Knibbs wrote at the time. Now, that lack of transparency is turning out to have wider consequences in the legal realm.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…