Comedian Sarah Silverman, 2 authors sue Meta, OpenAI for copyright infringement

The class action lawsuits were filed in the federal court of San Francisco on Friday. Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden claim that Facebook’s parent company Meta and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is supported by Microsoft Corp, utilized copyrighted material from their books to train chatbots.

As of Sunday, Meta and OpenAI had not responded to requests for comment.

These lawsuits highlight the legal risks faced by developers of chatbots when they employ copyrighted material to create applications that deliver authentic responses to user prompts.

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The plaintiffs, Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden, assert that Meta and OpenAI used their works without authorization in the development of their large language models. These models are promoted as robust tools for automating tasks by simulating human conversation.

In their lawsuit against Meta, the plaintiffs argue that leaked information about the company’s artificial intelligence business indicates the unauthorized use of their work.

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The lawsuit against OpenAI claims that the summaries generated by ChatGPT, a product of OpenAI, suggest that the bot was trained using their copyrighted content. “The summaries get some details wrong” but still show that ChatGPT “retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset,” the lawsuit stated.

Although the summaries contain some inaccuracies, they still indicate that ChatGPT possesses knowledge of specific works from the training dataset, as stated in the lawsuit.

The lawsuits are seeking unspecified financial compensation on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly infringed upon.

(With inputs from Reuters)

Updated: 10 Jul 2023, 06:45 AM IST