Google to Defend Users in Legal Disputes Over Artificial Intelligence Systems
(Reuters) – Google said on Thursday it would defend users of generative artificial intelligence systems on its Google Cloud and Workspace platforms if they are accused of intellectual property rights violations, joining Microsoft, Adobe and other companies that have made similar pledges.
Big tech companies like Google have invested heavily in generative AI and are racing to incorporate it into their products. Well-known authors, Illustrators and other copyright owners have said in several lawsuits that both the use of their work to train artificial intelligence systems and the content created by the systems infringes on their rights.
“To our knowledge, Google is the first in the industry to offer a comprehensive, two-pronged approach to compensation” that specifically covers both compensation claims, a company spokesperson said.
Google said its new policy applies to software, including its Vertex AI development platform and the Duet AI system that generates text and images in Google Workspace and Cloud programs. Google’s better-known generative AI chatbot program Bard was not mentioned in the press release.
The company also said compensation will not apply if users “intentionally create or use the output to infringe the rights of others.”
The new wave of generative AI lawsuits has tended to target the companies that own the systems, including Google, rather than individual end users.
Artificial intelligence advocates have said that using training data scraped from the Internet to train their systems is fair use under US copyright law.
