“Our AI models are trained primarily on publicly available information on the internet,” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said on Monday. “American law has long supported using public information in new and beneficial ways, and we will refute these claims in court.”
The artists’ attorneys Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick said in a statement that the case was “another instance of a multi-trillion-dollar tech company choosing to train a commercial AI product on the copyrighted works of others without consent, credit, or compensation.”
The artists asked the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and for an order forcing Google to destroy its copies of their work.
The case is Zhang v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 5:24-cv-02531.
For the artists: Joseph Saveri of Joseph Saveri Law Firm; Laura Matson of Lockridge Grindal Nauen; and Matthew Butterick
For Google: not yet available
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Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
