Adobe is facing a lawsuit that accuses the company of using writers’ copyrighted books without permission to train its artificial intelligence tools. The case was filed this week in a federal court in California and adds to a growing list of legal battles over how the tech giants train their AI systems. The lawsuit was brought by author Elizabeth Lyon, who writes instructional books on how to market novels, reports Reuters. She claims Adobe used pirated copies of her books, along with many others, to train its AI models without asking for approval.
According to the complaint, Adobe’s AI systems were trained using pirated versions of books. Lyon says these books were fed into Adobe’s SlimLM models, which are small language models designed to help users with document-related tasks on mobile devices. The complaint seeks financial compensation, although it does not name a specific amount, according to the report.
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This case is important because it is the first major copyright lawsuit targeting Adobe over AI training. However, it is part of a much larger trend. In recent years, many authors, artists, and publishers have sued technology companies, claiming their creative work was used to train AI systems without consent.
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Several well-known AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are already facing similar lawsuits. Anthropic agreed to settle a class action lawsuit for $1.5 billion earlier this year. That settlement became the largest ever recorded in a copyright-related case.
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