Sarah Silverman, along with two other authors, has taken legal action against OpenAI and Meta, alleging that their artificial intelligence software programs are unlawfully using their copyrighted works. This lawsuit highlights the ongoing debate surrounding the boundaries of emerging AI technology and its potential infringement on copyrighted materials. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman faced questions on this matter during a recent congressional hearing.
In their lawsuit, Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey claim that OpenAI’s ChatGPT relies on their works for its training dataset. They argue that their consent was not obtained for the use of their works in this manner, yet ChatGPT generates summaries of their copyrighted works when prompted, indicating that it was trained using their materials.
The lawsuit specifically mentions Silverman’s book, “The Bedwetter,” Golden’s “Ararat,” and Kadrey’s “Sandman Slime,” asserting that OpenAI copied these works. It further argues that OpenAI’s language models cannot function without the information contained in these books and that the models themselves are infringing derivative works. The lawsuit provides examples of OpenAI’s outputs when asked to summarize the books.
In a related development, Meta is also facing a lawsuit regarding their use of the authors’ works in their LLaMA language models. The lawsuit claims that Meta deliberately and knowingly made choices about including textual information from the authors’ works in their training dataset.
The lawsuits have been filed in federal court in San Francisco, with the plaintiffs seeking class-action status, as well as statutory damages, other forms of compensation, and injunctive relief. This legal action raises important questions about the intersection of AI technology and copyright law.
