In Search of NeMo: Nvidia Accused by Authors of Illegally Using Their Works for Neural Network Training

Last Friday, a group lawsuit was filed against Nvidia in the Federal Court of San Francisco. The authors of three literary works accuse the company of unlawfully using their publications to train its artificial intelligence (AI) system, NeMo, to create English-language texts.

Authors File Lawsuit Against Nvidia

The plaintiffs report that Nvidia used a selection of 196,640 literary texts to train its NeMo platform. The aim was to use AI to generate English texts. The authors of the books accuse the company of using their works without permission. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stuart O’Nan who claim Nvidia used the texts of their novels and novellas from various publication years without consent from the copyright holders.

The Growing Number of Infringement Lawsuits

The amount the plaintiffs are attempting to claim is not specified, but the nature of the group lawsuit suggests that other authors from the selection used by Nvidia for its training may join the claims. This is not the first such lawsuit Nvidia is facing. Previously, The New York Times also accused the company of wrongfully using its materials. Similar allegations have led several organizations to sue not just the creators of ChatGPT, OpenAI, but its financier, Microsoft, as well.