On Thursday, Google (GOOGL.O) persuaded a federal judge in San Francisco to dismiss a proposed class action over its alleged misuse of personal and copyrighted data to train artificial-intelligence systems, including its chatbot Bard.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin dismissed the case, citing concerns raised by another California judge in a related lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT.O).
Last month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria criticized the OpenAI complaint for containing “swaths of unnecessary and distracting allegations,” making it “nearly impossible to determine the adequacy of the plaintiffs’ legal claims.”
He dismissed the case but allowed it to be refiled. Martinez-Olguin stated that the nine individuals who sued Google could amend their complaint, advising them to make it “considerably more streamlined and crystallize the theory of this case.”
Ryan Clarkson of the Clarkson Law Firm, who represents the plaintiffs in both cases, and spokespeople for Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision.
The lawsuit, filed last July, accused Google of misusing content posted to social media and information shared on Google platforms to train AI systems.
This case is one of several recent lawsuits challenging tech companies’ alleged use of content like books, newspaper articles, visual art, and personal data without permission for AI training.
In October, Google responded that using publicly available data is necessary to train AI systems and that the lawsuit would “take a sledgehammer” to “the very idea of generative AI.”
