NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang speaks on stage at the New York Times Dealbook Summit 2023 held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City on November 29, 2023.
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Nvidia, which powers artificial intelligence-powered chips, has been sued by three authors for using copyrighted books without permission to train the NeMo AI platform.
Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O’Nan said their work was trained by NeMo to simulate normal written language before it was removed in October “due to a copyright infringement report.” It said it was part of a dataset of approximately 196,640 books that helped.
In a proposed class action lawsuit filed Friday night in San Francisco federal court, the authors say the takedown is an “admission” that Nvidia trained NeMo on the dataset and thereby infringed its copyright. He said it was reflected.
They are seeking unspecified damages from people in the United States who used NeMo’s copyrighted works to train NeMo’s so-called large-scale language models over the past three years.
Works targeted in the lawsuit include Keene’s 2008 novel “Ghost Walk,” Nazemian’s 2019 novel “Like a Love Story,” and O’Nan’s 2007 novel “Last Night at the Lobster.” is included.
Nvidia declined to comment Sunday. Lawyers for the authors did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment Sunday.
The lawsuit puts NVIDIA in the midst of a growing number of lawsuits by writers and the New York Times over generative AI, which creates new content based on input such as text, images, and audio.
Nvidia is touting NeMo as a quick and affordable way to deploy generative AI.
Other companies sued over the technology include OpenAI, which developed the AI platform ChatGPT, and its partner Microsoft.
The rise of AI has made Nvidia a favorite of investors.
The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker’s stock has risen nearly 600% since the end of 2022, giving Nvidia a market value of nearly $2.2 trillion.
The case is Nazemian et al. v. Nvidia Corp., U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 24-01454..
