Multiple book publishers sued Google on 14th July for allegedly stealing copyrighted content, using it to train artificial intelligence (AI) models and then generating content that “directly” competes with the original authors’ work.

According to the lawsuit, “The speed and volume of books that Gemini can produce is unparalleled, and its ability to compete with human writers is unprecedented.

Class action status was sought in New York, on behalf of Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and his publishing company S.C.R.I.B.E.

They claim that Google “secretly copied millions of works” from those made available to Google Books and other services for “limited purposes” and then “used that content to train Gemini, its AI model.

Additionally, they assert that the information produced by Gemini can compete with all the authors of the original content.

“Even Gemini customises outputs to imitate the expressive aspects and creative decisions of certain authors,” the lawsuit alleges.

The plaintiffs requested an injunction and an unspecified amount of damages.

It is the most recent copyright violation against the AI developers.

In May, multiple publishers – including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier and Turow – sued Meta on similar grounds in a New York court.

The judge authorised a $1.5 billion settlement between the company Anthropic and some authors who allege the San Francisco firm illegally used their work to power its artificial intelligence model, Claude, in September.

Partial success for Anthropic – a judge determined that the use of books to train Claude was transformative enough under US law to be considered “fair use”, but that other uses of the pirated material were not.

But last year, a judge in the United States District Court in San Francisco sided with a part of the company, ruling that its use of the copyrighted materials was “fair use”. The case was brought by comedian Sarah Silverman, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and others.