Mark Ruffalo has voiced his support for comedian Sarah Silverman and her lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement. In a tweet, the Marvel actor and three-time Oscar nominee predicted that the case will most likely become a landmark case.
Silverman is not alone in her legal action; she is joined by novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey. Collectively, they claim that OpenAI violated their works’ copyrights by using them as training data for their language model known as ChatGPT, without obtaining consent, credit, or compensation.
This is a class-action lawsuit, with Silverman and her co-plaintiffs representing a class defined as all persons or entities domiciled in the United States that own a United States copyright in any work that was used as training data for the OpenAI Language Models during the Class Period.
Given the large number of affected individuals and entities across the United States, it is impractical for all of them to join the lawsuit individually. Therefore, Silverman, Golden, and Kadrey will lead the charge in the case.
The authors, including Silverman, are confronting OpenAI over a long-standing issue faced by many artists and creators. They argue that their works are not being acknowledged or fairly compensated when used as data for language models and other artificial intelligence tools.
Similar copyright-related lawsuits have emerged recently, such as the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Warhol case, which explored the level of protection afforded to transformative works in commercial settings. As most generative AI work involves remixing numerous individual works to create something new, the Warhol verdict raised questions about its implications for AI-related lawsuits. Now, the pending case against OpenAI seeks to directly address whether the company’s data-gathering methods are protected under U.S. law or whether they constitute widespread copyright infringement.
At the time of writing, neither OpenAI, Mark Ruffalo, nor Sarah Silverman has responded to requests for comment by TheWrap.
