Title: Sarah Silverman and Authors Sue OpenAI and Meta for Alleged Copyright Infringements in AI Training
Comedian Sarah Silverman, along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, has taken legal action against OpenAI and Meta, claiming that their generative AI models, ChatGPT and LLaMA, have been developed using illegally obtained copyrighted material. The lawsuit alleges that the companies violated intellectual property laws by incorporating books written by the plaintiffs into their training datasets without permission or compensation.
Represented by Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick from the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, the plaintiffs assert that Meta and OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) were trained using copyrighted works, which they argue breaches unfair competition laws and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The same legal team has previously filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad. They have also created a website to help non-lawyers understand the cases.
Saveri and Butterick emphasize the importance of fair and ethical artificial intelligence for all. They state, We’ve filed lawsuits challenging ChatGPT and LLaMA, industrial-strength plagiarists that violate the rights of book authors.
The lawsuit provides evidence by highlighting how ChatGPT is capable of summarizing the plaintiffs’ books, presumably due to its training on the BookCorpus dataset, which contains copyrighted material. Additionally, the plaintiffs’ works were discovered among the book pirating websites that were scraped to create ‘ThePile,’ another dataset acknowledged by Meta for training LLaMA. The lawsuit seeks jury trials and injunctions that could potentially lead to significant changes in ChatGPT and LLaMA.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys note that since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT system in March 2023, numerous writers, authors, and publishers have voiced concerns about its ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted materials, including thousands of books. They further explain that the class-action lawsuit challenges ChatGPT and its underlying LLMs, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, for remixing copyrighted works without consent, compensation, or credit from thousands of book authors and others.
In related news, Shutterstock has followed in Adobe’s footsteps by offering legal protection against copyright violations for generative AI-derived synthetic media. Similarly, Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against Stability AI for alleged copyright infringements concerning generative AI art.
By taking legal action against OpenAI and Meta, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey hope to address the issue of intellectual property rights in the realm of artificial intelligence.
