In another turn of events, comedian Sarah Silverman, along with two authors have filed “copyright infringement lawsuits” against Meta and OpenAI. They have alleged that the companies have used their content without permission to train their artificial intelligence (AI) models.
This class action lawsuit that was brought in San Francisco federal court on Friday by Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christoper Golden alleged that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, have used copyrighted material to train their AI language models.
According to a Reuters report, Meta and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comments. The cases highlight the legal dangers chat bot developers have been facing since they utilise vast repositories of copyrighted content to produce programmes that provide accurate user responses.
All the plaintiffs have alleged that OpenAI stands to benefit commercially and make profits from not only their copyrighted work but also other copyrighted materials. The work because of which the case has been brought is Silverman’s book titled, “The Bedwetter,” which is a memoir by the comedian and actress. Silverman owns a registered copyright for the same.
The other plaintiffs are authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, whose copyrighted works include the dark urban fantasy “Sandman Slim” and the supernatural thriller “Ararat.” They demand a jury trial, statutory damages, and further compensation.
Though OpenAI has not revealed which books are part of their datasets, according to Business Insider, the court documents show that the content seems to come from a “shadow library,” which houses material that is otherwise not accessible to users.
The Chief Executives of Big Tech and AI Companies are being urged in an open letter published in June by The Authors Guild, a US-based advocacy group that supports the working rights of writers, to “obtain permission” from writers before using their copyrighted work to train generative AI programmes and to “compensate writers fairly.”
In addition to all of this, the summaries of the plaintiffs’ work produced by ChatGPT, according to the lawsuit against OpenAI, show the bot was trained on their copyrighted information. The lawsuit claims that while the summaries “get some details wrong,” they nonetheless demonstrate that ChatGPT “retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset.” On behalf of an international class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly infringed, the lawsuits demand unspecified monetary damages.
Previously, OpenAI had another class action case filed in California against its name. This lawsuit claims that their AI training practises violated the privacy and copyright of almost everyone who has ever contributed content online. OpenAI gathered a substantial amount of data from various web sources in order to train its cutting-edge AI language models. The content in these datasets ranges from Wikipedia articles, best-selling novels, social media posts, and popular periodicals to explicit material from specific genres. More importantly, OpenAI gathered all of this information without the content creators’ permission.
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