Authors sue Nvidia over NeMo AI model

Nvidia, whose chips power artificial intelligence, has been sued by three authors who said it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform.

Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O'Nan said their works were part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to simulate ordinary written language, before being taken down in October "due to reported copyright infringement."

In a proposed class action filed in San Francisco federal court, the authors said the takedown reflects Nvidia's having "admitted" it trained NeMo on the dataset, and thereby infringed their copyrights.

They are seeking unspecified damages for people in the United States whose copyrighted works helped train NeMo's so-called large language models in the last three years.

Among the works covered by the lawsuit are Keene's 2008 novel Ghost Walk, Nazemian's 2019 novel Like a Love Story and O'Nan's 2007 novella Last Night at the Lobster.