Comedian Sarah Silverman, along with authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Meta Platforms [META:US] and OpenAI, as reported by Reuters on July 9. These lawsuits, filed in San Francisco federal court, allege that Meta and OpenAI used their copyrighted material without permission to train artificial intelligence language models, particularly chat bots. The lawsuits shed light on the legal risks faced by chat bot developers who incorporate copyrighted content to create applications that deliver lifelike responses to user prompts.

The plaintiffs claim that Meta and OpenAI utilized their books without authorization to develop large language models, which are touted as powerful tools for automating tasks through human-like conversation replication. The lawsuit against Meta points to leaked information about the company’s AI business, suggesting that their work was employed without consent. Similarly, the lawsuit against OpenAI contends that the summaries generated by ChatGPT, the OpenAI chat bot, indicate that their copyrighted content was used for training. Although the generated summaries may contain some inaccuracies, the lawsuit argues that ChatGPT retains knowledge of specific works from the training dataset.

Sources:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/sarah-silverman-sues-meta-openai-copyright-infringement-2023-07-09/

https://nypost.com/2023/07/10/sarah-silverman-sues-openai-and-meta-for-copyright-infringement/