OpenAI and Microsoft have found themselves in another class-action lawsuit. The companies have been charged with the misuse of web scraping techniques to gain private information for utilisation in preparation of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) prototypes, as stated by Cointelegraph.
According to Cointelegraph, on September 5, 2023, the companies were sued in San Francisco by a law agency on behalf of certain anonymous engineers. “This class action lawsuit arises from Defendants’ unlawful and harmful conduct in developing, marketing, and operating their AI products, including ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4.0, Dall-E, and Vall-E (the ‘Products’), which use stolen private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge,” the lawsuit stated.
Based on Cointelegraph’s data, the lawsuit stated that OpenAI “doubled down on a strategy to secretly harvest massive amounts of personal data from the internet,” post reorientation in 2019. “Without this unprecedented theft of private and copyrighted information belonging to real people,” the plaintiffs mentioned. From what it’s understood, ChatGPT, DALL-E and OpenAI’s other models have been referred to as “the products,” and that they “would not be the multi-billion-dollar business they are today.”
Moreover, Cointelegraph noted that the filing has specified the plaintiffs wanting the courts to give them and other members of given categories reimbursement for damages. Insights from the suit has also stated that the courts asked defendants for executing “nonrestituionary disgorgement” of profits, on account of unlawful data scraping.
(With insights from Cointelegraph)
