Since ChatGPT took the world by storm, US comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors have sued Open AI for copyright infringement.
The plaintiffs accuse the San Francisco corporation of exploiting their works without their consent to train their artificial intelligence models, adding to a string of lawsuits that might impede the advancement of the biggest new trend in technology.
The group also launched a lawsuit against Facebook’s parent firm Meta, alleging that Meta’s less well-known open source models used illegal downloads of their books for training.
A significant portion of the training materials utilized by OpenAI and Meta “comes from copyrighted works—including books written by the plaintiffs—that were copied by OpenAI and Meta without consent, without credit, and without compensation,” according to a blog post by the group’s legal counsel.
The writers are claiming a number of copyright violations in both complaints, which were submitted on Friday in a California court and accuse the tech corporations of utilizing their books to train their AI models.
If these cases are successful, they will change how technology is created, reducing the ability of tech oligopolies to create their models and produce compelling, human-like material.
Source-code owners against OpenAI and Microsoft’s GitHub, graphic artists, and the photo agency Getty against Stability AI are among the plaintiffs in the bombardment of recent lawsuits.
The most recent case was brought by Matthew Butterick and San Francisco attorney Joseph Saveri on behalf of Silverman and authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden.
The lawsuit referred to Silverman’s 2010 bestselling memoir “The Bedwetter,” Golden’s horror novel “Ararat” and Kadrey’s Sandman Slim supernatural noir series.
Silverman is best known in the United States for her edgy and often controversial humor as well as being outspoken on social and political issues.
Against OpenAI, the plaintiffs say they “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material for ChatGPT. Nonetheless, their copyrighted materials were ingested and used to train ChatGPT.”
The authors provided exhibits in the lawsuit that gave ChatGPT’s detailed summaries of their works.
Against Meta, the trio say the company turned to an illegally constructed “shadow library” to build the firm’s LLaMA models that included their works.
To publish copyrighted works in violation of the law, these libraries exploit pirated torrent downloads.
While Meta did not immediately react to a request for comment, OpenAI declined to address the lawsuit.
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