Nvidia sued by 3 authors over AI use of copyrighted works

Nvidia, whose chips power artificial intelligence, has been sued by three US authors who said it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform.

Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O’Nan said their works were part of a data set of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to simulate ordinary written language, before being taken down in October “due to reported copyright infringement”.

In a proposed class action filed on Friday night in San Francisco federal court, the authors said the takedown reflects Nvidia’s having “admitted” it trained NeMo on the data set, and thereby infringed their copyrights.

American writer Stewart O’Nan. Photo: Beth Navarro / Handout

They are seeking unspecified damages for people in the United States whose copyrighted works helped train NeMo’s so-called large language models in the past three years.

Among the works covered by the lawsuit are Keene’s 2008 novel Ghost Walk, Nazemian’s 2019 novel Like a Love Story, and O’Nan’s 2007 novella Last Night at the Lobster.

Nvidia declined to comment on Sunday. Lawyers for the authors did not immediately respond to requests on Sunday for additional comment.

The lawsuit drags Nvidia into a growing body of litigation by writers, as well as The New York Times newspaper, over generative AI, which creates new content based on inputs such as text, images and sounds.

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Nvidia, founded by Taiwan-born American businessman Jensen Huang, touts NeMo as a fast and affordable way to adopt generative AI.

Other companies sued over the technology have included OpenAI, which created the AI platform ChatGPT, and its partner Microsoft.

AI’s rise has made Nvidia a favourite of investors.

The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker’s stock price has risen almost 600 per cent since the end of 2022, giving Nvidia a market value of nearly US$2.2 trillion.

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