Another AI Lawsuit by Authors
You probably know I’m not a fan of AI. It’s a mess for copyright law and hurts book sales. You can read more about that in this post.
In fact, your intellectual property has most likely been plagiarized if you ever used AI to help you write your book in any way. And if you published a book before August 25, 2025, you might be able to receive $3,000 per work due to a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, as I mentioned previously.
Luckily, authors and publishers are fighting back. In addition to the Anthropic lawsuit mentioned above, and another lawsuit against Google by authors and illustrators, there’s a new one against Google spearheaded by Hachette Book Group, one of the world’s biggest publishers.
This latest lawsuit states that “Google reproduced millions of copyrighted works without permission… and with full knowledge that its conduct violated copyright law… Google also conceal[ed] its training sources [to] facilitate their unauthorized use.”
Additionally, the lawsuit states that due to the vast amount of illegally obtained copyrighted material used to train Gemini, Google’s generative AI tool, “the market is flooding with AI-generated substitutes. The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented, and it can only do that because Google copied Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s works to train its AI.”
Plagiarism on this scale obviously “causes, and continues to cause, substantial and irreparable harm to Plaintiffs and the Class.”
This harm was noted personally by author John Miller, as just one example. According to 90.5 WESA, when Miller typed the title of his book into Amazon, he found “‘nine different versions of my book and none of them were by me.’” Even though Miller’s book The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball is a New York Times bestseller, “a recent search for ‘Earl Weaver’ on Amazon, ‘Last Manager,’ despite its high customer ratings, came up third” behind two probable AI-generated books on the same topic. Those AI-generated books didn’t outright copy Miller’s book, but cobbled together similar information to profit off Miller’s success—without doing any of the work to earn it.
There are obviously more AI generative tools and companies out there than just Anthropic and Google. But we artists can hope that these lawsuits will be settled in our favor, and that they set a precedent for AI companies to follow in the future.
This may be wishful thinking. As also stated in the lawsuit, since tech companies are racing each other for dominance, they feel breaking the law is worth whatever fines and court fees they may face. And when people don’t care about consequences or basic human decency, not much will stop them.
Some people believe AI is a gamechanger that must be adopted lest they get left behind the tech power curve. But we’re really not there yet. Those AI-generated books are repetitive, unorganized, and boring. As I’ve said before, AI-generated material has no soul.
So far, as I see it, AI is best used for these 3 things:
- Helping brainstorm and organize ideas
- Improving accessibility for people with disabilities
- Making cute cat videos
If you want to use AI for more than that, you should ask yourself if you’re really ready to let a rogue computer database think for you, instead of thinking for yourself.
I rest my case.
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