Nvidia has been sued by authors over the use of artificial intelligence for copyrighted works

Written by Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) – Three authors have filed a lawsuit against Nvidia, whose chips power artificial intelligence, saying it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform.

Brian Kane, Abdi Nazemian and Stuart Onan said their work was part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to mimic regular written language, before it was taken down in October “due to reported copyright infringement.”

In a proposed class action lawsuit filed Friday night in federal court in San Francisco, the authors said the takedown reflects Nvidia's “admission” that it trained NeMo on the data set and thus infringed its copyright.

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

Among the works covered in the suit are Kenny'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 Sunday for additional comment.

The lawsuit drags Nvidia into a growing swath of lawsuits by writers, as well as The New York Times, over generative artificial intelligence, which creates new content based on inputs such as text, images and sounds.

Nvidia is touting NeMo as a fast and affordable way to adopt generative AI.

Other companies that have filed lawsuits over the technology include OpenAI, which created the AI ​​platform ChatGPT, and its partner Microsoft.

The rise of artificial intelligence has made Nvidia a favorite among investors.

The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker's stock price has risen nearly 600% since the end of 2022, giving Nvidia a market value of about $2.2 trillion.

The case is Nazemian et al. v. Nvidia, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 24-01454.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Josie Kao)