A group of publishers and authors filed lawsuits against Google on Tuesday, accusing it of copyright infringement by using protected content to train its AI models and then producing content that directly competes with the original works of the authors.
The lawsuit claims that "the scale and speed of the Gemini model's ability to produce books and compete with human writers is unprecedented."
The lawsuit was filed in a New York court as a class action by the publishing houses Hachette Book Group, SAGE Learning, and Elsevier, along with author Scott Turow and his publishing company S.C.R.I.B.E, according to the French Press Agency.
The plaintiffs accuse Google of having "secretly copied millions of works" it obtained through the Google Books service and other services for specific purposes, and then used that material to train the AI model Gemini.
They also assert that the content produced by Gemini directly competes with the original works created by the rights holders.
The lawsuit added: "Gemini even customizes its outputs to mimic the expressive elements and creative choices of specific authors."
This is the latest copyright case brought against AI development companies.
A group of publishers, including Hachette, Sage, and Elsevier, along with Scott Turow, filed a similar lawsuit against Meta in May before a New York court.
In September, an American judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and several authors who accused it of illegally copying their works to train its AI model Claude.
The decision represented a partial victory for Anthropic, as the judge determined that using books to train the model could be considered "fair use" under U.S. law, while other uses of pirated materials were found to be illegal.