Anthropic, which is an artificial intelligence (AI) company backed by Amazon, faced a lawsuit for copyright infringement by notable authors. As reported by Reuters, Claude,the company’s AI chatbot has been accused of being trained with pirated works of writers/journalists.
On Monday, the complaint was filed by writers and journalists Charles Graeber, Andrea Bartz, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They claimed that Anthropic used ‘pirated version’ of their works for adding them in Claude AI as responses to human prompts.
Anthropic faces copyright infringement
The authors mentioned in their complaint that “Anthropic has built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books,” according to Reuters. The authors further added that Anthropic shows itself as a company for the public, aiming to improve humanity which might not be true. They claim that by promoting copyrighted works, it has miserably failed and has the potential to cause mass destruction.
Additionally, the lawsuit also included several other high-stakes complaints filed by copyright holders. This included news outlets, visual artists and record labels on the material used by tech companies to train their generative AI systems.
In response to this , a spokesperson for Anthropic said on Tuesday that the company was already aware of the lawsuit. However, after analysing the complaint they decided to decline to comment further, citing pending litigation.
Furthermore, the lawsuit also asked for a sum of money as monetary damages which is yet to be disclosed. The lawsuit also asked for an order to block Anthropic permanently from misusing the authors’ work.
The way ahead
As the debate over artificial intelligence (AI) Vs humans continues, there seems to be a rising misuse of AI. This is not the first time that companies have faced allegations of copyright infringement for illegally using content to feed large language models (LMS) for their AI chatbots.
Last year during the month of October, Music publishers ABKCO, Concord Publishing and Universal Music, complained against Anthropic for copyright infringement. On October 19, they sued Anthropic in the federal court of Tennessee. Anthropic was alleged of misusing a large number of copyrighted song lyrics for training its chatbot Claude.
According to the lawsuit the company had violated the publishers’ rights by using lyrics from about 500 songs. Some of these songs included popular records such as God Only Knows, the Beach Boys’, the Rolling Stones’. It also used lyrics from Gimme Shelter by Mark Ronson and Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars and Halo by Beyoncé’s, among others.
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