Publishers Strike Back Against Google in Infringement Suit; Publishers Weekly, February 6, 2026

 Jim Milliot , Publishers Weekly; Publishers Strike Back Against Google in Infringement Suit

"The Association of American Publishers continued its fight this week to allow two of its members, Hachette Book Group and Cengage, to join a class action copyright infringement lawsuit against Google and its generative AI product Gemini. The lawsuit was first brought by a group of illustrators and writers in 2023.

In mid-January the AAP filed its first motion to allow the two publishers to take part in the lawsuit that is now before Judge Eumi K. Lee in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Earlier this week the AAP filed its reply to Google’s motion asking the court to block AAP’s request.

At the core of Google’s argument is the notion that the publishers should have asked to intervene sooner, as well as the assertion that publishers have no interest in the case because they don’t own authors works.

In its response, AAP argues that it was only when the case reached class certification that the publishers’ interests became clear. The new filing also rebuts Google’s other claim that publishers’ don’t own any rights.

“Google’s professed misunderstanding of ownership exemplifies exactly the kind of value that Proposed Intervenors bring to the case,” the AAP stated, arguing that both HBG and Cengage own certain rights to the works in question and that “scores” of other publishers will be impacted by the litigation."

AI’S MEMORIZATION CRISIS: Large language models don’t “learn”—they copy. And that could change everything for the tech industry.; The Atlantic, January 9, 2026

Alex Reisner, The Atlantic; AI’S MEMORIZATION CRISIS: Large language models don’t “learn”—they copy. And that could change everything for the tech industry

"On tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books."

Who Pays When A.I. Is Wrong?; The New York Times, November 12, 2025

Ken Bensinger, The New York Times; Who Pays When A.I. Is Wrong?

"Search results that Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence technology, delivered at the top of the page included the falsehoods. And mentions of a legal settlement populated automatically when they typed “Wolf River Electric” in the search box.

With cancellations piling up and their attempts to use Google’s tools to correct the issues proving fruitless, Wolf River executives decided they had no choice but to sue the tech giant for defamation.

“We put a lot of time and energy into building up a good name,” said Justin Nielsen, who founded Wolf River with three of his best friends in 2014 and helped it grow into the state’s largest solar contractor. “When customers see a red flag like that, it’s damn near impossible to win them back.”

Theirs is one of at least six defamation cases filed in the United States in the past two years over content produced by A.I. tools that generate text and images. They argue that the cutting-edge technology not only created and published false, damaging information about individuals or groups but, in many cases, continued putting it out even after the companies that built and profit from the A.I. models were made aware of the problem.

Unlike other libel or slander suits, these cases seek to define content that was not created by human beings as defamatory — a novel concept that has captivated some legal experts."

Google CEO Pichai says Gemini's AI image results "offended our users"; NPR, February 28, 2024

Bobby Allyn , NPR; Google CEO Pichai says Gemini's AI image results "offended our users"

"Gemini, which was previously named Bard, is also an AI chatbot, similar to OpenAI's hit service ChatGPT. 

The text-generating capabilities of Gemini also came under scrutiny after several outlandish responses went viral online...

In his note to employees at Google, Pichai wrote that when Gemini is re-released to the public, he hopes the service is in better shape. 

"No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry's development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes," Pichai wrote."