American comedian Sarah Silverman and writers Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey have filed a joint lawsuit against OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California, alleges that OpenAI used copyrighted works, including books written by the plaintiffs, without permission to train its advanced language model, GPT. The plaintiffs claim that OpenAI created derivative works and publicly displayed or distributed them without proper authorization.
The lawsuit also argues that OpenAI’s language models are derivative works themselves, as they rely on creative content derived from the plaintiffs’ works. The plaintiffs assert that OpenAI has the ability to control the output generated by its models and profits from the infringing output. They are seeking class action certification, a jury trial, and various remedies, including statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, and more.
In another lawsuit against OpenAI, two other authors from California have also alleged that the use of books to train the artificial intelligence model infringes their copyrights. They are seeking class action certification on behalf of all U.S. residents who hold U.S. copyrights in any work used by OpenAI to train its models.
The second lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) copies any text entered and gradually adjusts its output to resemble the word sequences found in the training materials. The plaintiffs argue that much of the training data for GPT comes from copyrighted works, including their own books. They accuse OpenAI of copying the books without permission, credit, or proper compensation. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI has unlawfully obtained data from copyrighted books, potentially including those from Project Gutenberg.
The lawsuits against OpenAI also include allegations of privacy violations. One lawsuit filed in California federal court accuses OpenAI’s ChatGPT of collecting personal data from the internet without consent, violating privacy laws. Microsoft is named as a co-defendant due to its significant control over OpenAI through past and future investments. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI focused solely on economic profits, disregarding its original mission of advancing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
Additionally, Google and Alphabet have been hit with a class action lawsuit in San Francisco, alleging that the tech giant scraped and stole personal data and copyrighted works from millions of Americans to develop commercial artificial intelligence products, including its competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, called Bard. The lawsuit accuses Google of covertly collecting massive amounts of data without permission from protected websites and violating privacy and property rights.
The lawsuits against OpenAI and Google highlight concerns over copyright infringement, privacy violations, and the use of personal data in developing advanced language models and artificial intelligence products. The plaintiffs seek legal remedies to protect their intellectual property rights and privacy, emphasizing the need to address these issues in the rapidly evolving field of AI development.
