Comedian Sarah Silverman, along with authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, has initiated lawsuits against Meta Platforms and OpenAI, accusing them of copyright infringement for the unauthorized use of their works in training artificial intelligence language models.
The class action lawsuits, filed on Friday in a federal court in San Francisco, allege that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, utilized copyrighted content without consent to develop their chatbot technologies.
As of Sunday, neither Meta nor OpenAI, which is supported by Microsoft, had provided a response to the media regarding the allegations.
These lawsuits highlight the potential legal challenges faced by developers of chatbot technologies that rely on extensive databases of copyrighted content to generate plausible responses to user queries.
Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden claim that Meta and OpenAI used their literary works without permission, in the creation of large language models that are promoted as sophisticated tools designed to mimic human conversation for various automated tasks.
In the suit against Meta, the plaintiffs refer to leaked information indicating that their works were improperly utilized without their approval.
The allegations against OpenAI point out that summaries of the authors’ works produced by ChatGPT suggest the chatbot was trained using their copyrighted materials.
According to the lawsuit, while “the summaries get some details wrong,” they still demonstrate that ChatGPT retains knowledge of specific works within its training dataset.
The lawsuits seek unspecified monetary damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright holders whose works have reportedly been infringed upon.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
