Former Amazon exec alleges she was told to ignore the law while developing an AI model ‘everyone else is doing it’ [Video]

A former Amazon executive is accusing the company of telling her to violate copyright law to compete with other tech giants in AI.

Viviane Ghaderi filed a lawsuit against Amazon in Los Angeles Superior Court, saying she was discriminated against and ultimately fired.

The complaint, dated April 16, was reported earlier this week by The Register, which published the document in full.

Ghaderi said she was tasked with flagging possible legal violations in how Amazon was developing its LLMs, or large-language models.

(LLMs are text-generating services like Open AI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard.)

The complaint says Ghaderi’s boss, Andrey Styskin, told her to ignore legal advice and Amazon’s own policies to get better results.

From the lawsuit:

The allegation about Amazon’s AI work came in a larger case where Ghaderi alleges she was demoted and ultimately fired for taking maternity leave.

In a statement to Business Insider, Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan did not directly address Ghaderi’s claims.

She did say …