Tech giant Nvidia is facing a fresh lawsuit from three writers who have accused the company of using their works to train its large language model (LLM)

The three authors, Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O'Nan, have sued the graphics card company for allegedly using their works as part of a dataset of over 195,000 books that were used to help train Nvidia’s NeMo AI framework.

The data set was taken down in October due to “reported copyright infringement”, which the lawsuit says shows that Nvidia “admitted” it was used to train NeMo in violation of their rights.

The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco federal court on Friday, seeks unspecified damages for people in the US whose copyrighted works have been used to train the LLM.

This is the latest legal action being taken by creators over use of copyrighted work to train AI models. A group of authors including Game of Thrones writer George RR Martin are suing OpenAI for what they describe as “systematic theft on a mass scale”, while the New York Times has accused the AI tech company of “unlawful use” of its work to create its products.

Image generation company Midjourney late last year saw a spreadsheet containing the names of thousands of artists that have allegedly been used to train its tech go viral. The list includes the names of more than 4,700 artists whose works are said to have been ‘scraped’ to train the company’s tech, with thousands more listed under a ‘proposed additions’ tab.

The spreadsheet quickly spread across social media during the holiday period. One notable poster was Jon Lam, a senior storyboard artist at League of Legends-owner Riot Games, who posted screenshots from Discord where Midjourney developers, in his words, discuss “laundering” and creating a database from which they can train the software.

One of the messages reads: "All you have to do is just use those scraped datasets and then conveniently forget what you used to train the model. Boom legal problems solved forever.

Nvidia chief exec Jason Huang recently caused a stir last month when, speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, he suggested that children should not learn how to code and instead rely on AI for programming tasks.

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