Group of high-profile authors sue Microsoft over use of their books in AI training

Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its Megatron AI to respond to human prompts. The authors requested a court order blocking Microsoft's infringement and statutory damages of up to 150,000 for each work that Microsoft allegedly misused. Generative artificial intelligence products like Megatron produce text, music, images and videos in response to users' prompts. To create these models, software engineers amass enormous databases of media to program the AI to produce similar output. The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an AI product that gives text responses to user prompts.