WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Multiple book publishers sued Google on Tuesday for allegedly stealing copyrighted content, using it to train artificial intelligence (AI) models and then generating content that "directly" competes with the original authors' work.

"The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented," the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit, which requests class action status, was filed in New York by Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and his publishing company S.C.R.I.B.E. -

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.

Furthermore, they claim 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.