Amazon allegedly broke its own copyright laws to keep itself in the AI race

A newly filed lawsuit against Amazon alleges the company broke its own copyright policy to prevent it from falling out the global generative artificial intelligence race that numerous big tech companies are embarking on.

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The lawsuit was filed last week in a Los Angeles state court by Dr Viviane Ghaderi, an AI researcher, who claims to have worked in Amazon's Alexa and Large Language Model (LLM) departments. Ghaderi claims she was promoted several times in both of these departments, but was allegedly demoted and eventually fired following her return back from maternity leave.

Ghaderi has placed many allegations against Amazon, claiming the company has discriminated against her, is inherently sexist towards her, retaliation, wrongful termination, and many other claims. More specifically, Ghaderi says when she returned to work, she was tasked with an LLM project, the underlying technology powering impressive tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, and her role was flagging instances of the LLM violating Amazon's own copyright policy.

The former Amazon executive said she was then tasked with discussing these flagged instances with Amazon's legal team. According to Ghaderi's filings, her team's director, Andrey Styskin, asked why the project wasn't meeting search quality goals. Ghaderi expressed concern about the advice given by Amazon's legal department regarding internal copyright policies being violated by the project, hindering its process.

Styskin allegedly dismissed Ghaderi's concerns and said to ignore the copyright policies and meet the expected goals, with Ghaderi specifically alleging Styskin said, "Everyone else is doing it", which refers to other AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, etc.

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