US Comedian Sarah Silverman Files Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Meta, OpenAI
Meta Platforms and OpenAI are facing copyright infringement lawsuits from comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors. The lawsuits claim that the companies have utilized their content without obtaining proper permission in order to train artificial intelligence language models.
The class-action lawsuit filed Friday in San Francisco federal court by Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden alleges Facebook parent Meta and ChatGPT maker OpenAI used copyrighted material to train chatbots.
Meta and Microsoft-backed private company OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday. The lawsuits highlight the legal risks chatbot developers face when they use a wealth of copyrighted material to create apps that realistically respond to user prompts.
Silverman, Kadrey and Golden allege that Meta and OpenAI used their books without permission to develop their so-called large language models, which their makers see as powerful tools for automating tasks by replicating human conversation.
In their lawsuit against Meta, the plaintiffs claim that leaked data from the company’s artificial intelligence business shows that their work has been used without permission. The lawsuit against OpenAI claims summaries of the plaintiffs’ work created by ChatGPT show that the bot was trained on their copyrighted content.
“The summaries distort some details,” but still show that ChatGPT “maintains information about certain works of the educational data set,” the suit says. The lawsuits seek unspecified monetary damages on behalf of a nationwide group of copyright owners whose works are allegedly infringed.
