- Adobe accused of using pirated books to form SlimLM
- The company claims to have 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 United States, with a class-action lawsuit alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated books without permission.
Oregon author Elizabeth Lyon filed a lawsuit, claiming the tech giant trained its AI models not only on her books but also on other people’s work.
The lawsuit focuses specifically on Adobe’s small SlimLM language models that are used for document support tasks on mobile devices.
Adobe faces class action lawsuit over AI training data
The company denied these allegations, saying that SlimLM was trained on SlimPajama-627B – an open source dataset released by Cerebras in 2023. However, the lawsuit claims that SlimPajama is a derivative of RedPajama, which reportedly includes Books3 – a dataset of nearly 200,000 pirated books.
In short, Lyon argues that because SlimPajama includes RedPajama/Books3, it contains copyrighted works without consent, credit or compensation.
Adobe is also accused of “repeatedly downloading, copying, and processing these works during pre-processing and pre-training of models.”
This is not the first time RedPajama or Books3 have been involved in legal cases, having previously appeared in suits against Apple and Salesforce.
Lyon says she is “determined to vigorously pursue this action on behalf of the other members of the class” and has the “financial resources to do so.”
The plaintiff seeks “an award of statutory and other damages,” reimbursement of attorneys’ fees, and a declaration of willful infringement by Adobe.
TechRadar Pro requested a formal response from Adobe, but the company has yet to respond.
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