Google is accused of stealing the entire internet

Google, DeepMind and their parent company Alphabet have been sued for “secretly stealing everything that has ever been created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans” to create their own AI chatbot, bard.

The class-action lawsuit involves eight people under pseudonyms – among them two minors, 13 and 6 years old – who represent the interests of millions of netizens. They accuse Alphabet of ten violations of US and California laws related to Bard and other Google AI products.

plaintiffs claim that Google updated its privacy policy in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) warning that “machine learning is not an excuse to break the law.” According to the plaintiffs, Google admitted that it uses public data from the internet to train its artificial intelligence models and services. However, that hasn’t changed the fact that Google is “secretly grabbing everything that has ever been created and shared online by hundreds of millions of Americans” without their knowledge or consent.

The news comes shortly after similar lawsuits were filed against Microsoft-backed OpenAI, alleging privacy infringement and abuse of collected data, as well as copyright infringement.

DeepMind, which is still led by co-founder Demis Hassabis after being bought by Google in 2014, is named in the lawsuit because of its work on the Language Model for Conversation Applications (LaMDA), which is considered essential to the development of Bard, as well as other Google products in the field. artificial intelligence.

The plaintiffs are seeking at least $5 billion in damages, an injunction against further use of the stolen data, and the implementation of “effective cyber security measures” to protect data subjects.

Google’s General Counsel Halima DeLane Prado said the company “has been clear for years that we use publicly-sourced data to train AI models behind services like Google Translate responsibly and in accordance with our AI principles.”