Adobe faces class action lawsuit after allegedly misusing authors work in AI training

• Adobe accused of using pirated books to train SlimLM
• The company asserts it used SlimPajama-627B – an open-source Cerebras dataset
• The plaintiff claims sufficient financial resources to "vigorously" pursue this case

Adobe is set to face an AI copyright lawsuit in the US, with a class-action case alleging that the company trained its AI models on pirated books without permission.

Oregon author Elizabeth Lyon filed the case, claiming that the tech giant had trained its AI models not only on her books, but the work of others, too.

The lawsuit focuses specifically on Adobe's SlimLM small language models which are used for document assistance tasks on mobile devices.

Adobe faces AI training data class action lawsuit

The company has denied the allegations, asserting that SlimLM was trained on SlimPajama-627B – an open-source dataset that was released by Cerebras in 2023. However, the lawsuit claims that SlimPajama is a derivative of RedPajama, which allegedly includes Books3 – a dataset of nearly 200,000 pirated books.

In short, Lyon argues that because SlimPajama includes RedPajama/Books3, it contains copyrighted work without consent, credit, or compensation.

Adobe is also accused of having "repeatedly downloaded, copied, and processed those works during the preprocessing and pretraining of the models."

It's not the first time that RedPajama or Books3 have been involved with legal cases, previously appearing in lawsuits against Apple and Salesforce.

Lyon says she's "committed to vigorously prosecuting this action on behalf of the other members of the class," and that she has the "financial resources to do so."

The plaintiff is seeking "an award of statutory and other damages," the reimbursement of attorney fees and a declaration of willful infringement from Adobe.

TechRadar Pro has sought a formal response from Adobe, but the company has not yet responded.

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