By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) – Nvidia, whose chips power artificial intelligence, has been sued by three authors who said it used their copyrighted books without permission to teach its NeMo AI platform.

Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O’Nan said their works were an element of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to simulate bizarre written language, before being taken down in October “due to reported copyright infringement.”

In a proposed class motion filed on Friday night in San Francisco federal court, the authors said the takedown reflects Nvidia’s having “admitted” it trained NeMo on the dataset, and thereby infringed their copyrights.

They’re looking for unspecified damages for people within the US whose copyrighted works helped train NeMo’s so-called large language models throughout the last three years.

Amongst the numerous works covered by the lawsuit are Keene’s 2008 novel “Ghost Walk,” Nazemian’s 2019 novel “Like a Love Story,” and O’Nan’s 2007 novella “Last Night on the Lobster.”

Nvidia declined to comment on Sunday. Lawyers for the authors didn’t immediately reply to requests on Sunday for extra comment.

The lawsuit drags Nvidia right right into a growing body of litigation by writers, along with the Recent York Times, over generative AI, which creates latest content based on inputs akin to text, images and sounds.

Nvidia touts NeMo as a fast and affordable technique to adopt generative AI.

Other firms sued over the technology have included OpenAI, which created the AI platform ChatGPT, and its partner Microsoft.

AI’s rise has made Nvidia a favorite of investors.

The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker’s stock price has risen almost 600% for the rationale that end of 2022, giving Nvidia a market value of nearly $2.2 trillion.

The case is Nazemian et al v Nvidia Corp, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 24-01454.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in Recent York; Editing by Josie Kao)