Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, has filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement. The suits allege that the artificial intelligence models developed by OpenAI and Meta, such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, were trained on their copyrighted works without permission.
Language models like ChatGPT rely on large amounts of data from the internet to train and provide responses to user prompts. The lawsuit against OpenAI claims that the authors’ copyrighted books were used to train ChatGPT without their consent. Similarly, the suit against Meta asserts that their copyrighted works appeared in the dataset used to train LLaMA.
The lawsuits claim that the authors’ works were obtained from “shadow library” sites, which have been of interest to the AI training community. The exhibits in the OpenAI suit demonstrate that ChatGPT was able to summarize three books by Silverman, Golden, and Kadrey upon prompting. The Meta suit cites multiple works by Kadrey and Golden, along with Silverman’s book, and highlights a Meta paper indicating the use of material from shadow libraries, which the suit deems “flagrantly illegal.”
ChatGPT’s ability to generate text similar to copyrighted material
The authors’ lawyers, Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, state that they have received concerns from writers, authors, and publishers about ChatGPT’s ability to generate text similar to copyrighted material, which has led to the lawsuits.
Additionally, another class-action lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI by authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, claiming that ChatGPT was trained on their works without their consent. Getty Images is also suing the AI image generator Stable Diffusion for alleged copyright infringement.
Saveri and Butterick are representing artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz in a lawsuit against image generators Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt.
These legal actions against AI models also address the issue of false answers or “hallucinations” that can occur. A radio host from Georgia is suing OpenAI for defamation after ChatGPT falsely accused him of fraud.
