Google accused of using 'hundreds of millions' of people's data to train an AI bot

A class action lawsuit has been filed in the US alleging that Google used "hundreds of millions" of people's data to power its artificial intelligence technology, including the Bard chatbot.

The lawsuit was filed by eight plaintiffs "on behalf of" the rest of the U.S. population.

It states: "Google is secretly stealing everything that hundreds of millions of Americans have ever created and shared online," including "personal and professional information, our creative and copyrighted works, our photographs, and even our emails - virtually our entire digital footprint."

The eight men who filed the suit are represented only by their initials, but documents republished in the Register show that one of the plaintiffs is six years old and another is 13.

One of the applicants is an "actor and professor," another is an author, and a third regularly publishes posts on YouTube and TikTok.

The documents detail how an author's work can be reproduced when using Google Bard. "Upon request, Bard offers not only a detailed, chapter-by-chapter summary of the book's content, but also to regenerate the text of her book verbatim," the case document states.

The group is suing Google's parent company Alphabet for $5 billion.

Their main claim is that "publicly available" has never meant free to use for any purpose, and that "Google needs to understand once and for all: it does not own the Internet, own our creative works, own our expressions of our personalities, photos of our families and children, or anything else just because we share it online."

The case attacks Google on ten fronts, including violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 U.S. law that provides mechanisms for removing infringing content from platforms such as YouTube.

Earlier this month, Google updated the wording of its privacy policy, making it clearer that it does use user data when developing its products.

"Google uses information to improve our services and develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and society. For example, we use publicly available information to train Google's artificial intelligence models and build products and features such as Google Translate, Bard and cloud-based artificial intelligence capabilities," the company's policy read in early July, according to Search Engine Journal, though the wording appears to have changed once again since then.

Google's privacy policy still states that your data is used to "develop new products and features that are useful to our users."

This is not the first case brought against companies developing generative AI technologies.

Last January, Getty Images sued Stability Diffusion creator StabilityAI in a London court, alleging that it used Getty's copyrighted photos to train its generative artificial intelligence models. In February, a similar lawsuit was filed in the US.