Comedian Sarah Silverman, alongside authors Richard Kadrey, Christopher Golden, and others, is suing OpenAI and Meta for allegedly using her copyrighted work without permission to train their chatbots.
The lawsuit claims that Silverman’s book, “The Bedwetter,” was used along with hundreds of thousands of other books to train OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA chatbot.
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The plaintiffs argue that the tech firms copied their copyrighted works without consent, credit, or compensation.
According to their lawyers, books are considered valuable training data in the AI community, and the lawsuit references a study by researchers from MIT and Cornell.
The study highlighted the positive effects of using books in machine learning.
The lawsuit also mentions the existence of “shadow libraries,” such as Bibliotik, Library Genesis, and Z-Library.
It claims that these libraries provide bulk content through torrent services and are allegedly of interest to the AI-training community.
The plaintiffs note that ChatGPT, when prompted, can summarize their books but does not include the books’ copyright information in the summaries, adding an ironic twist to the case.
The lawsuit brings claims of copyright violation, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. The plaintiffs seek unspecified statutory damages and restitution of profits.
This lawsuit reflects the growing concerns about the training data used by generative AIs.
Getty Images has already filed a case against Stability AI for allegedly using its images to train an art-generating AI.
Furthermore, there is an ongoing class-action lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI for copyright infringement related to the use of source code from GitHub to train the Copilot code-generating AI system.
The Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers, has also published an open letter accusing tech firms of exploiting their work without consent, credit, or compensation for training AI.
They argue that generative AI could flood the market with machine-written content based on their work, potentially damaging their profession.
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The outcome of the lawsuit will likely depend on the concept of “fair use,” which allows for the use of copyrighted material under certain circumstances.
OpenAI and Meta have not yet provided a comment on the matter. The story will be updated if a response is received.
