Sarah Silverman Sues OpenAI and Meta Alleging Copyright Infringement
Comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey have filed separate lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI, alleging that the companies used copyrighted materials from their books to train their AI language models without permission.
The lawsuits were filed in a San Francisco federal court and seek class action status.
Concerns have been raised about the use of copyrighted works in training large language models, as these models have the potential to disrupt the livelihoods of creators.
The complaint against OpenAI states that ChatGPT, when prompted, generates summaries of the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, implying that it was trained on their books without their consent.
Similarly, the complaint against Meta claims that the company used the authors’ copyrighted books to train its language models, including LLaMA, without permission or compensation.
The lawsuit against Meta also alleges that the company accessed copyrighted material through an online “shadow library” website.
Meta declined to comment on the lawsuit, while OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This legal action follows a previous lawsuit filed against OpenAI, which accused the company of misappropriating personal data from the internet to train its AI tools.
In May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the need to address creators’ concerns and mentioned exploring models where creators would be compensated for the use of their content or style by AI systems.
