Overview
- Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in California federal court alleging Apple trained its AI on illegal shadow libraries of copyrighted books.
- The complaint says Apple relied on datasets of pirated texts scraped from the internet, with some reports pointing to the Books3 subset of The Pile as a source used to build the system.
- The plaintiffs claim Apple used their titles, Champions of Illusion and Sleights of Mind, without permission to train and test its models.
- They seek unspecified monetary damages and an injunction to bar Apple from using their works in AI training going forward.
- Apple has not commented on the filing, which follows a wave of similar cases against AI firms and comes after Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion authors’ settlement in August.