Two professors sue Apple over use of books to train Apple Intelligence

Two neuroscience professors sued Apple in federal court on Oct. 9, alleging the company used thousands of copyrighted books without authorization to train its Apple Intelligence artificial intelligence tools. In a proposed class action filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik, both professors at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, said Apple relied on shadow libraries and web-scraped datasets containing unauthorized copies of books to build and refine its AI models.

The complaint asserts that Apple used datasets that included the Books3 collection and other materials scraped from the internet to train components of Apple Intelligence, naming OpenELM as one of the models. The plaintiffs say the alleged training data included their two books, Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles, and Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions. The professors are seeking unspecified monetary damages and an order barring further use of their copyrighted works in Apple’s AI training.