Hammer Time Google has moved to dismiss a class action data-scraping lawsuit alleging that the Silicon Valley Giant’s AI training practices violated “hundreds of millions” of internet users’ privacy, data ownership, and intellectual property rights. The lawsuit, filed in San Fransisco back in July, is a sweeping condemnation of Google’s AI training procedures, arguing that Google has only been able to build its AI models by way of “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans.” AI is data-hungry, and as the lawsuit tells it, Google’s decision to feed its AI models using web-scraped data — the vast majority of it created by millions, if not billions, of everyday netizens — amounts to nothing short of theft. For its part, Google sounds alarmed. In the search giant’s dismissal motion, filed this week, it denounces the accusations, arguing not only that it’s done absolutely nothing wrong, but that the lawsuit also undermines the generative AI field as a whole. “Using publicly available information to learn is not stealing,” Google writes in the document. “Nor is it an invasion of privacy, conversion, negligence, unfair competition, or copyright infringement.” Siding with the prosecutors would “take a sledgehammer not just to Google’s services,” the filing continues, “but to the very idea of generative AI.” Lines in the Sand The statements in Google’s dismissal represent an intense ideological battle at the heart of the burgeoning AI field: who really owns the internet and the immeasurable scores of material found across…Google Terrified of Lawsuit That Would "Take a Sledgehammer" to Generative AI