Eight unnamed individuals sued Google in San Francisco in July for supposedly misusing content posted to social media and information shared on Google platforms to train its systems.

The lawsuit is one of several recent complaints over tech companies’ alleged misuse of content like books, visual art, source code and personal data without permission for AI training.

Google told the court on Monday that the use of public data is necessary to train systems like its chatbot Bard. It said the lawsuit would “take a sledgehammer not just to Google’s services but to the very idea of generative AI.”