In a proposed class action on Thursday, professors Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of Brooklyn, New York’s SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University claimed the court that the tech corporation trained Apple Intelligence using illegal “shadow libraries” of copied literature. Last month, a different group of writers filed a lawsuit against Apple for allegedly abusing their work in AI training. IT BUSINESSES CONFLICTED WITH LAWSUITS The accusation is one of several high-profile lawsuits that copyright holders, including writers, media organizations, and record labels, have filed against tech firms, such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms, for using their work in AI training without permission.
In August, Anthropic consented to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a lawsuit brought by another group of authors about the training of their chatbot Claude, which was powered by artificial intelligence. Requests for comment on the new case on Friday were not immediately answered by representatives for Apple, Martinez-Conde, Macknik, and their lawyer. A collection of AI-powered capabilities included into iOS devices, such as the iPhone and iPad, is called Apple Intelligence. The lawsuit claimed that the day following Apple’s official launch of Apple Intelligence was “the single most lucrative day in the company’s history,” with the company’s value rising by over $200 billion. The complaint claims that Apple trained its AI system using datasets that included thousands of books that had been pirated and other copyright-violating content that had been scraped from the internet.
“Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles” by Martinez-Conde and “Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions” by Macknik were among the books that were stolen, according to the complaint. The professors asked for an order to restrict Apple from abusing their copyrighted work and an undisclosed amount of monetary damages.
