Sarah Silverman is suing the creator of ChatGPT.
Sarah Silverman suing ChatGPT
The 52-year-old comic has accused OpenAI and Meta, who own LLaMA, of stealing information from her 2010 book 'The Bedwetter', and has joined fellow authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden in class-action copyright lawsuits against the firms.
The suit alleged the AI language models were trained on their books without the writers' permission and claimed both hatGPT and LLaMA were likely fed the tomes from "shadow library" databases such as Library Genesis and Z-Library, which was branded "flagrantly illegal".
Documents obtained by The Daily Beast stated: “The books aggregated by these websites have also been available in bulk via torrent systems, these flagrantly illegal shadow libraries have long been of interest to the AI-training community.”
Submissions attached to the OpenAI lawsuit showed ChatGPT can summarise the authors' books when asked, producing a "derivative" work of almost any copyrighted source.
The lawsuit stated: "If a user prompts ChatGPT to summarise a copyrighted book, it will do so."
Both suits even suggested the very existence of the AI models are illegal under the Copyright Act because they need to be fed with potentially copyrighted information to work as anticipated.
The OpenAI suit questioned “whether ChatGPT itself is an infringing derivative work based on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted books", while the Meta paperwork alleged the LLaMA models are “themselves infringing derivative works,” since they “cannot function without the expressive information extracted from the Plaintiffs’ Infringed Works.”
The class action suits currently only include the three plaintiffs but allege there are "at least thousands of members in the Class” around the US whose copyrights are potentially being violated.
The two lawsuits each contain six counts of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment and unfair competition.
The authors are seeking statutory damages and restitution of profits.
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