A former Amazon executive has filed a lawsuit against the tech giant in a California court, alleging Amazon pressured her to break copyright laws in the pursuit of advancements in Gen AI.

Dr Viviane Ghaderi, who was an AI researcher, says she worked in Amazon’s Alexa and LLM teams, achieved a number of promotions, but claims she was later demoted and fired upon returning to work after giving birth. 

Dr Ghaderi asserts that Amazon singled her out for raising concerns about copyright infringement in AI research. 

According to Ghaderi’s complaint, she was tasked with flagging violations of Amazon’s internal copyright policies and escalating these concerns to the company’s legal team. However, she alleges that her concerns were dismissed by her team director, Andrey Styskin, who purportedly instructed her to ignore copyright policies to improve AI results, citing that “everyone else is doing it.”

The filing continues that she requested to be moved to another team, but was denied and placed on a “Pivot” plan instead, which meant complying with performance targets or leaving. 

Ghaderi claims the plan was designed to ensure she failed, for example, by asking her to complete impossible tasks like reduce data storage costs across the entire AmazonBot web crawling organisation by 75% in just eight workdays.

The filing adds that after she requested guidance on the task she was told she “should be able to do this with no help.” This, despite several senior engineers allegedly confirming they believed this task would be impossible in the given timeframe. 

These allegations come amidst a backdrop of legal cases concerning copyright infringement in AI training data. Ghaderi’s lawsuit also includes accusations of discriminatory treatment following her disclosure of pregnancy, including forced changes to her reporting structure and unreasonable work demands during her maternity leave.

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Amazon has responded to the lawsuit, stating that it does not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or retaliation in the workplace and that it investigates any reports of such conduct. The case management conference is scheduled for August 14, where further details are expected to emerge.

The lawsuit underscores the challenges and ethical considerations surrounding the development of AI technologies and highlights the importance of maintaining legal and ethical standards in AI research and development.