Condé Nast and a number of other media business took legal action against the AI start-up Cohere today, declaring that it participated in “systematic copyright and trademark infringement” by utilizing news posts to train its big language design.

“Without permission or compensation, Cohere uses scraped copies of our articles, through training, real-time use, and in outputs, to power its artificial intelligence (‘AI’) service, which in turn competes with Publisher offerings and the emerging market for AI licensing,” stated the suit submitted in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. “Not content with just stealing our works, Cohere also blatantly manufactures fake pieces and attributes them to us, misleading the public and tarnishing our brands.”

Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica and other publications such as Wired and The New Yorker, was taken part the claim by The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, The Plain Dealer, Politico, The Republican, the Toronto Star, and Vox Media.

The problem looks for statutory damages of as much as $150,000 under the Copyright Act for each infringed work, or a quantity based upon real damages and Cohere’s revenues. It likewise looks for “actual damages, Cohere’s profits, and statutory damages up to the maximum provided by law” for violation of hallmarks and “false designations of origin.”

In Exhibit A, the complainants determined over 4,000 posts in what they called an “illustrative and non-exhaustive list of works that Cohere has infringed.” Extra exhibitions offer actions to questions and “hallucinations” that the publishers state infringe upon their copyrights and hallmarks. The suit stated Cohere “passes off its own hallucinated articles as articles from Publishers.”

Cohere safeguards copyright controls

In a declaration offered to Ars, Cohere called the claim unimportant. “Cohere strongly stands by its practices for responsibly training its enterprise AI,” the business stated today. “We have long prioritized controls that mitigate the risk of IP infringement and respect the rights of holders. We would have welcomed a conversation about their specific concerns—and the opportunity to explain our enterprise-focused approach—rather than learning about them in a filing. We believe this lawsuit is misguided and frivolous, and expect this matter to be resolved in our favor.”