The action notes, “The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented.”

The lawsuit, which requests class action status, is by the French-owned Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and his publishing company S.C.R.I.B.E.

In May, the same group of publishers raised an action against Meta on similar grounds.

They allege that “Google secretly copied millions of works” that were provided to Google Books and other services for “limited purposes” and then used that content to train Gemini, its AI model.

In addition, it is claimed that the content generated by Gemini directly competes with the authors who wrote the original work: “Gemini even tailors outputs to mimic the expressive elements and creative choices of specific authors,” the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs requested an injunction and an unspecified amount of damages.

In September, a US court approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and several authors who claimed the San Francisco company illegally copied their work to train its AI model, Claude.

In a partial victory for Anthropic, the court ruled that the company’s use of books to train Claude was transformative enough to constitute “fair use” under US law but that other uses of pirated materials were not.