OpenAI, Meta Sued for copyright infringement by US comedian Sarah Silverman

In order to prevent Meta Platforms and OpenAI from allegedly exploiting their work without their consent to train artificial intelligence language models, comedian Sarah Silverman and two writers have filed lawsuits for copyright infringement.

According to the proposed class action lawsuits filed on Friday in San Francisco federal court by Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden, the makers of ChatGPT, Meta, and Facebook, the parent company, are accused of using copyrighted content to teach chatbots.

On Sunday, requests for comment from Meta and OpenAI, a private firm supported by Microsoft Corp., were not immediately fulfilled. The cases highlight the legal dangers chat bot developers have when using vast repositories of copyrighted content to produce programs that provide accurate customer fast replies.

The so-called big language models that Meta and OpenAI claim are effective tools for automating jobs by mimicking human discourse were created using Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden’s books, according to Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden.

The plaintiffs are suing Meta on the grounds that leaked information regarding the firm’s artificial intelligence business demonstrates their work was exploited without their consent. Summaries of the plaintiffs’ work produced by ChatGPT, according to the complaint against OpenAI, show the bot was trained on their copyrighted information.

The complaint claims that although the summaries “get some details wrong,” they nonetheless demonstrate that ChatGPT “retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset.” On behalf of an international class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly violated, the lawsuits demand unspecified monetary damages.