The progress of technology, and in particular artificial intelligence (AI), is the main motive for substantial changes in the field of law. As a result, worldwide, and especially in common law systems, there is a trend of increasing disputes closely related to the use of artificial intelligence. Of particular interest are the cases brought by so-called class actions that enable the protection of the rights of a larger group connected by the same legal and factual issues, in a single, more efficient court procedure.
Given the fact that the use of artificial intelligence has become common to the level of everyday life, it is not surprising that situations often arise in which end users believe that some of their rights have been violated. As a result, a large number of disputes are being initiated, in which the institute of class action plays an important role.
Several class action lawsuits have been initiated in the USA that have as their basis, the use of artificial intelligence in relation to biometric privacy and surveillance. The defendants in such disputes include large, world-renowned companies such as Amazon, Home Depot, as well as Clearview AI, which agreed to pay an amount of just over $51 million to a group of plaintiffs as a result of violations in the use of artificial intelligence to collect photos of individuals’ faces from publicly available websites.
A number of class action lawsuits have also been filed as a result of misrepresentation of the role of artificial intelligence in the products or services that companies offer on the market. Among them, the largest is the case against the AI operator Anthropic, where several authors (with the potential for the number to increase to seven million plaintiffs) claimed that their copyrighted works were used without authorization by Anthropic to train Claude, an AI chatbot.
These figures show that the use of AI is popularizing legal institutions that previously had relatively limited application. While the number of class actions for AI-related disputes in the USA is increasing significantly, it remains to be seen whether this trend will spread to Europe, especially given the Representative Actions Directive that also provides this option to citizens of the European Union.