Adobe has gone all-in on AI, launching tools, sprinkling \u201cgenerative\u201d on everything, and rolling out Firefly, its shiny AI-powered creative suite, to prove it can also do the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But this week, Adobe\u2019s AI ambitions wandered into familiar legal quicksand: a lawsuit accusing the company of training one of its AI models on pirated books.<\/p>\n
The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of Elizabeth Lyon, a nonfiction author from Oregon, who claims Adobe used unauthorized copies of her books to train an AI model called SlimLM.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to the complaint, Adobe\u2019s AI education may have involved a little too much \u201cborrowed\u201d reading material.<\/p>\n
SlimLM, as Adobe describes it, is a small language model designed for document assistance tasks, particularly on mobile devices.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Adobe says the model was trained using SlimPajama-627B, an open-source dataset released by Cerebras in mid-2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That sounds reassuring, until you read the lawsuit\u2019s footnotes, where things get spicy.<\/p>\n
Lyon\u2019s lawyers argue that SlimPajama is essentially a remix of another dataset called RedPajama, which itself allegedly includes Books3: a massive collection of around 191,000 books that has haunted AI companies like a copyright poltergeist.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to the lawsuit (first reported by Reuters), SlimPajama contains derivative copies of Books3, and therefore copyrighted works, including Lyon\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Books3 has become the \u201cyou again?\u201d of AI litigation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s popped up in lawsuits against Apple over its Apple Intelligence platform and against Salesforce for allegedly training AI systems on copyrighted material without permission, credit, or compensation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At this point, if your dataset includes Books3, a lawyer may already be drafting a complaint.<\/p>\n
Sadly for the tech industry, this is no longer shocking news. Training modern AI requires enormous datasets, and those datasets sometimes wander into legally questionable territory.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors who accused it of using pirated works to train its chatbot, Claude, a settlement widely seen as a warning shot.<\/p>\n
For Adobe, the lawsuit is another reminder that AI may be fast, powerful, and creative, but copyright law still reads everything very, very carefully.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"