Mike Huckabee Joins Suit That Claims Microsoft, Meta Stole His Books to Train AI

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is among a group of Christian authors who filed a federal lawsuit targeting tech companies for training their artificial intelligence tools using their books without permission.

The suit, filed in a New York federal court, is one of a growing number that accuses tech companies of infringing on the work of writers and other creators.

Last month, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Elin Hilderbrand and other prominent fiction writers joined the Authors Guild in filing a class action lawsuit against OpenAI. In July, comedian Sarah Silverman and two other writers also sued OpenAi for copyright infringement.

Huckabee’s suit focuses on what The Washington Post described as “an infamous collection of pirated books,” known as “books3” which the writers claim was included in a free collection of data sources known as “the pile” that was created to help small companies access more data to train their own AI.

The suit targets Meta, Microsoft and Bloomberg L.P., all of which have trained the algorithms that power their artificial intelligence tools, called “large language models,” using data from the web, The Post reported. EleutherAI, the nonprofit behind books3, is also named as a defendant.

Joining Huckabee, who is also host of a eponymous talk show on TBN, in the suit are Christian writers and podcasters Tish Oxenreider and Lysa TerKeurst.

“While using books as part of data sets is not inherently problematic, using pirated (or stolen) books does not fairly compensate authors and publishers for their work,” the suit said. , which include Huckabee, who is also host of a epynonymous talk show on TBN, and Christian writers and podcasters including Tish Oxenreider and Lysa TerKeurst, said in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, which is proposed as a class-action, seek unspecified damages and an injunction to ban the companies from continuing to use their work, The Post reported.

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