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A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit on Thursday.
“It’s important that companies that use copyrighted material for … AI products are transparent,” attorney Joseph Saveri, who represents the authors and has brought similar lawsuits on behalf of copyright owners against tech companies, said on Thursday. “It’s also only fair that our clients are fairly compensated when this happens.”
Tanzer and Gilmore said in their lawsuit that Salesforce used thousands of pirated books written by them and others to train xGen. The lawsuit said that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has previously criticized AI companies for using “stolen” training data to build their models and said that paying content creators for their work would be “very easy to do.”
“Benioff is right — technology companies like Benioff’s own Salesforce that use the intellectual property of copyright holders like Plaintiffs and Class members should fairly compensate them,” the complaint said.
Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman
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