AI training with sketchy data repository "The Pile" returns to the courts in a lawsuit by Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC accusing just about all of big tech of piracy. The problem is, Apple denies using it to train Apple Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is a term that has virtually lost all meaning because of its being applied to everything. In that sense, it seems a lawsuit has mistakenly included Apple when it has previously denied utilizing the dataset in question.

According to a lawsuit from Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC, Apple, Meta, xAI, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, and NVIDIA are all in violation of copyright thanks to training their respective artificial intelligence tools on a dataset known as "The Pile." While that dataset is filled with proprietary content, like YouTube subtitle files, it wasn't used by Apple to train Apple Intelligence.

The portion of "The Pile" in question is a shadow library referred to "Books3." It is a collection that contains mountains of copyrighted works, including some books on magic that sparked a previous class action lawsuit.

It isn't known whether the other companies involved utilized "The Pile," but considering they scraped the web for everything, chances are good. Apple, however, was one of the only companies attempting to legally and ethically build its AI dataset back in 2024.

There's a good chance the case will need to be reduced in scope to remove Apple, at the least. Apple researchers did use "The Pile" for an open-source project called OpenELMs, which was published publicly and never used for Apple Intelligence.

The other companies won't be so lucky. Perplexity and others have defended their use of information found on the web. Meanwhile, Apple has repeated its claims that Apple Intelligence was trained ethically and respects publishers.

Of course, all of this could get incredibly complicated as Apple's new Apple Foundation Models are trained with Google Gemini. If Google is implicated in the lawsuit, and Gemini trained what is powering Apple Intelligence in the future, Apple could still be dragged into the lawsuit.

Apple hasn't shared any new statement on this case. Like all lawsuits, expect this to be a drawn-out affair.