Nvidia sued by authors for using literary works to train AI model

GPU juggernaut Nvidia has found itself embroiled in a legal dispute as three authors file a lawsuit against it with allegations that it used their literary works without authorisation in the development of its NeMo AI platform.

In a class action lawsuit filed Friday evening in San Francisco federal court, the authors Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O'Nan claimed that their writings were included in a collection of approximately 196,640 books used to teach NeMo how to mimic everyday written language.

The dataset, however, was removed in October following reports of copyright violation.

The authors alleged that by removing the dataset, Nvidia acknowledged its use in training NeMo, constituting copyright infringement.

The three are pursuing unspecified damages on behalf of individuals in the United States whose copyrighted materials contributed to training NeMo's extensive language models over the past three years, reported Reuters.

The lawsuit encompasses works such as 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.'

The case, Nazemian et al v Nvidia Corp, has been filed at US District Court, Northern District of California.

NVIDIA NeMo (Neural Modules) is like a toolbox that helps people create, train, and make small adjustments to AI models that can chat with you.

The company explains, "NVIDIA NeMo™ is an end-to-end, cloud-native framework to build, customize, and deploy generative AI models anywhere. It includes training and inferencing frameworks, guardrailing toolkits, data curation tools, and pretrained models, offering enterprises an easy, cost-effective, and fast way to adopt generative AI."

The lawsuit pulls Nvidia into an expanding realm of legal battles initiated by authors, alongside the New York Times, against makers of generative AI.

Among the companies facing legal action over the technology are OpenAI, the creator of the AI platform ChatGPT, and its collaborator Microsoft.

The surge of AI has propelled Nvidia into the spotlight among investors, making it a top choice for many when it comes to graphics processing units. Since the close of 2022, Nvidia's stock price has soared by nearly 600 per cent, catapulting its market value to nearly $2.2 trillion.