March 10 (Reuters) - Nvidia ( NVDA ), whose chips power

artificial intelligence, has been sued by three authors who said

it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its

NeMo AI platform.

Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O'Nan said their

works were part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped

train NeMo to simulate ordinary written language, before being

taken down in October "due to reported copyright infringement."

In a proposed class action filed on Friday night in San

Francisco federal court, the authors said the takedown reflects

Nvidia's ( NVDA ) having "admitted" it trained NeMo on the dataset, and

thereby infringed their copyrights.

They are seeking unspecified damages for people in the

United States whose copyrighted works helped train NeMo's

so-called large language models in the last three years.

Among the works covered by the lawsuit are Keene's 2008

novel "Ghost Walk," Nazemian's 2019 novel "Like a Love Story,"

and O'Nan's 2007 novella "Last Night at the Lobster."

Nvidia ( NVDA ) declined to comment on Sunday. Lawyers for the

authors did not immediately respond to requests on Sunday for

additional comment.

The lawsuit drags Nvidia ( NVDA ) into a growing body of litigation

by writers, as well as the New York Times ( NYT ), over generative AI,

which creates new content based on inputs such as text, images

and sounds.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) touts NeMo as a fast and affordable way to adopt

generative AI.

Other companies sued over the technology have included

OpenAI, which created the AI platform ChatGPT, and its partner

Microsoft ( MSFT ).

AI's rise has made Nvidia ( NVDA ) a favorite of investors.

The Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker's stock price

has risen almost 600% since the end of 2022, giving Nvidia ( NVDA ) a

market value of nearly $2.2 trillion.

The case is Nazemian et al v Nvidia Corp ( NVDA ), U.S. District

Court, Northern District of California, No. 24-01454.