Google says learning isn't stealing in one of its AI copyright lawsuits

Google has urged a California federal court to dismiss a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the company's data scraping for generative AI violates privacy and property rights. The tech giant defended its use of public data to train systems like its Bard chatbot, claiming that the lawsuit would "take a sledgehammer to not only Google's services, but the very idea of generative AI," and that "using publicly available information to learn is not stealing." The lawsuit was filed by eight individuals in July, accusing Google of misusing content from social media and Google platforms to train AI. Google's general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, called the lawsuit "baseless" and said U.S. law supports using public information for new beneficial uses.