By Blake Brittain
(Reuters) -Cloud-computing firm Salesforce was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit by two authors who alleged the company used thousands of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence software.
Novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore said in the complaint filed on Wednesday that Salesforce infringed copyrights by using their work to train its xGen AI models to process language.
A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit on Thursday.
"It’s
important that companies that use copyrighted material for ... AI products are transparent," attorney Joseph Saveri, who represents the authors and has brought similar lawsuits on behalf of copyright owners against tech companies, said on Thursday. "It’s also only fair that our clients are fairly compensated when this happens."
Authors, news outlets and other content owners have filed dozens of lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms for allegedly misusing their material in AI training. Anthropic agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion settlement with a separate group of authors suing it for copyright infringement in August.
Tanzer and Gilmore said in their lawsuit that Salesforce used thousands of pirated books written by them and others to train xGen. The lawsuit said that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has previously criticized AI companies for using "stolen" training data to build their models and said that paying content creators for their work would be "very easy to do."
"Benioff is right — technology companies like Benioff’s own Salesforce that use the intellectual property of copyright holders like Plaintiffs and Class members should fairly compensate them," the complaint said.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
