A coalition of artists and writers who allege Google unlawfully used their copyrighted works to train its generative artificial intelligence models has asked a California federal judge to grant class certification, formally allowing them to pursue the case on behalf of a broader group of creators.
In a motion filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the plaintiffs proposed creating two main classes — one for authors whose books were used lawfully obtained but improperly used in AI training, and a subclass for those whose works were pirated. Two additional proposed subclasses were redacted from the filing. The plaintiffs also asked to form a separate class of visual artists whose images were allegedly used without authorization, excluding any works for which Google had obtained licensing rights.
Plaintiffs: “Google Needed Vast Quantities of Creative Work”
According to the motion, the lawsuit centers solely on copyright violations, arguing that Google copied and ingested artistic and literary works on a massive scale to build and train its AI systems in order to compete with other major technology firms.
