Adobe hit with proposed class-action, accused of misusing authors’ work in AI training

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. In every social media platform, in every software program. In recent years, countless companies have implemented this technology into their operations, adding features and tools based precisely on this controversial resource. The digital video graphics giant Adobe, of course, is no exception.

According to a recent lawsuit, the company in question allegedly used pirated books to train one of its artificial intelligence models. In 2023, Adobe released several AI services, including Firefly, an AI-powered suite capable of generating visual media. The class action lawsuit in question was filed on behalf of Elizabeth Lyon, an author who claims that the company used several pirated books, including hers, to train the SlimLM program.

The latter is described as a small language model that can be used for document assistance tasks on mobile devices. Adobe claims to have trained it using SlimPajama-627B, a deduplicated, multi-corpus, open-source dataset released by Cerebras in 2023. However, Lyon does not seem to agree.