Pearson initiates legal proceedings against company that used its content to train language models

The company has already issued a cease-and-desist letter to an unnamed tech firm

Educational publisher Pearson has initiated legal proceedings against the use of its intellectual property (IP) for training AI models.

The UK-based company says it intends to take legal action against entities or individuals who use its IP without permission.

CEO Andy Bird said Pearson is closely monitoring the use of its content by other businesses to train their AI.Pearson has already issued a cease-and-desist letter, Bird added, without disclosing the recipient's identity.

"We're committed to protecting that IP and we're following developments in fields such as music and photography with great interest," Bird said.

"We take great efforts, and will continue to do, to protect our IP. We are in litigation with a company and have sent a cease-and-desist letter, but I won't go into any further specifics.

"We've also been approached to licence our IP and at the time decided not to go down that route. But there may be benefits of licensing our IP at certain circumstances."

Bird noted that it is typically easy to identify what a large language model like ChatGPT has been trained on because "you can ask it."

Pearson's response comes a few months after the emergence of generative AIs in the public marketplace, which have the potential to revolutionise the way people work and interact.

In February, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, the creators of Stable Diffusion, for employing images from Getty's collection to train their AI model. The lawsuit claims that Stability AI copied over 12 million photographs from the Getty catalogue for this purpose.

Pearson's stock price fell by 15% last week following an announcement from its American competitor, Chegg, which said that ChatGPT's emergence had negatively impacted their business.

Chegg reported a 5% decline in subscribers and withdrew its full-year guidance, the impact eventually resulting in nearly £1 billion being wiped off Pearson's market capitalisation.

"Since March we have seen a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT," said Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, whose company's stock price plummeted by nearly 50% after the publication of its Q1 results.

"We now believe it's having an impact on our new customer growth rate."

However, Pearson CEO Bird made a distinction between Pearson and Chegg. He noted that Chegg focuses more on providing homework aid, offering on-demand answers to college course questions for $19.95 per month.

"They are in a very different business to us," Bird said. "We see a great differentiator between what Chegg are offering and what Pearson+ [its subscription prodoct] are offering."

Bird added that as Pearson is involved in the business of learning, its products would be hard to substitute.

Pearson recently released its Q1 results, which surpassed its initial projections.

The company now plans to expand the use of AI in its offerings. Andy Bird stated that Pearson intends to leverage AI in various applications, including the creation of quizzes and summaries based on learning materials for Pearson+.