John C. Herman, of Herman Jones LLP in Atlanta, told Fox News Digital that Google's control of wide swaths of digital content, powered with the emergence of artificial intelligence, gives it the potential for '"terrifying" power. The attorney behind a major class-action lawsuit against Google claims that advances in artificial intelligence give the digital monopoly almost unlimited power to control lives, influence thought and shape society. "When the average person interacts with the internet, Google monitors and controls everything," John C. Herman, of Herman Jones LLP in Atlanta, told Fox News Digital. "From the search results, to the advertisements, to the web pages themselves, Google controls it all," he said. INVISIBLE AI'S'INTELLIGENT AGENT' CAMERAS CAN SEE WHAT AUTOWORKERS AND MACHINES ARE DOING WRONG He also said, "Adding in an AI component, we now have a single company that dictates what news people see, what products they buy and even how they vote."

When Prometheus stole fire from the gods to gift it to mortals, he enabled humans to begin civilization. But he still had to pay dearly for his crime, being bound to a rock as an eagle pecked out his liver. The lesson of the Greek myth is that while new technology can bring revolutionary benefits, there is always a price to pay in exchange. Creators of new technology may be the focus of the ire, but its users can still get burned. It's a myth that technology leaders should keep in mind as they consider the booming generative AI products market.

Lawyer and developer Matthew Butterick announced last month that he'd teamed up with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate Copilot. They wanted to know if and how the software infringed upon the legal rights of coders by scraping and emitting their work without proper attribution under current open-source licenses. Now, the firm has filed a class-action lawsuit in the District Court of Northern California in San Francisco. "We are challenging the legality of GitHub Copilot," Butterick said. "This is the first step in what will be a long journey. As far as we know, this is the first class-action case in the US challenging the training and output of AI systems. It will not be the last. AI systems are not exempt from the law. Those who create and operate these systems must remain accountable," he continued in a statement.

A class-action lawsuit has been launched against OpenAI and Microsoft over GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot uses technology from OpenAI to help generate code and speed up software development. Microsoft says that it is trained on "billions of lines of public code … written by others." Last month, developer and lawyer Matthew Butterick announced that he'd partnered with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate whether Copilot infringed on the rights of developers by scraping their code and not providing due attribution. This could unwittingly cause serious legal problems for GitHub Copilot users. "Copilot leaves copyleft compliance as an exercise for the user.

More than a million Illinois residents will receive a $397 settlement payment from Facebook this week, thanks to a legal battle over the platform's since-retired photo-tagging system that used facial recognition. It's been nearly seven years since the 2015 class-action lawsuit was first filed, which accused Facebook of breaking a state privacy law that forbids companies from collecting biometric data without informing users. The platform has since faced broad, global criticism for its use of facial recognition tech, and last year Meta halted the practice completely on Facebook and Instagram. But as Vox notes, the company has made no promises to avoid facial recognition in future products. Even though it was first filed in Illinois, the class-action lawsuit eventually wound up on Facebook's home turf -- at the U.S. District Court for Northern California.

TikTok quietly changed its US privacy policy this week to notify users it may start collecting'faceprint and voiceprint' and other biometric data. The app did not specify what the data would be used for but said it would ask for permission first, 'where required by law.' The update comes just three months after TikTok paid more than $90 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming it secretly recorded millions of members' facial features and other biomarkers. TikTok reportedly has 100 million users in the US alone. TikTok has updated its privacy policy to notify US users it may record the'faceprint and voiceprint' and other unique biometric data.

The secretive startup was exposed last week in an explosive New York Times report which revealed how Clearview was selling access to "faceprints" and facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies across the US. The startup claimed it could identify a person based on a single photo, revealing their real name, general location, and other identifiers. The report sparked outrage among US citizens, who had photos collected and added to the Clearview AI database without their consent. The Times reported that the company collected more than three billion photos, from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Venmo, and others. This week, the company was hit with the first lawsuit in the aftermath of the New York Times exposé.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 8 are here. Check out what's clicking on FoxNews.com The maker of Fortnite may face a class-action lawsuit in Canada after two parents of teenage sons alleged last week the company purposely designed the multiplayer video game to be as addictive as cocaine, according to reports. The Montreal-based law firm, Calex Légal, filed a motion in Quebec Superior Court Thursday on behalf of two parents who approached the firm separately about their 10- and 15-year-old sons, who they claim developed a severe dependence on the game, USA Today reported. The suit, which has yet to be approved by the court, seeks to hold the U.S.-based video game publisher Epic Games Inc., as well as its Canadian affiliate based in British Columbia, accountable for using psychologists and statisticians "to develop the most addictive game possible."

Facebook is notifying more users of its facial recognition features as it faces increased scrutiny over how the technology may infringe upon their privacy. Many users who logged onto Facebook on Tuesday reported seeing a message from the firm on their News Feed outlining several new facial recognition features. Facebook now notifies users when someone uploads a picture of them that they haven't been tagged in, among other features. Facebook notified some users on their News Feeds of the firm's new facial recognition technology. The features tell users when a photo of them has been uploaded to Facebook that they haven't been tagged in yet and if a stranger uses a photo of them as their profile picture The features were first announced last December, but Facebook has been gradually rolling them out over the past several months.