Comedian and actor Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta, accusing tech companies of developing artificial intelligence tools that copied her memoir, The Bedwetter, without permission.
Silverman, an Emmy Award-winning performer and former “Saturday Night Live” performer, is the latest content creator to file a lawsuit over the so-called Large Language Model (LLM) that underpins its rapid growth. “Generative” AI apps such as ChatGPT. LLMs develop their capabilities by “training” them on vast amounts of writing and other content, including material authored by professional and amateur writers.
Mr. Silverman’s lawyers said it would be a “crime” to train an AI to process someone else’s intellectual property, including books and other copyrighted material. Silberman, along with two other authors, Chris Golden and Richard Cudley, filed a lawsuit on July 7, citing OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, and Facebook owner Meta as his own work. was accused of copying “without consent, without credit, without compensation.” The plaintiffs seek an injunction against OpenAI and Meta from using the author’s work and monetary damages.
In an exhibit accompanying a complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, ChatGPT was asked to summarize Silberman’s memoir and the work of other authors. Accurate summaries and verbatim excerpts from the works have been prepared, according to the complaint, but without the copyright information customarily printed on these and other books. This is evidence that a complete copy of the work has been supplied.
According to plaintiffs’ attorneys, both OpenAI and Meta trained their respective LLMs based in part on “shadow libraries” — repositories of vast amounts of “clearly illegal” pirated books. Citing internal OpenAI research, the complaint says the books “provide the best examples of high-quality long-form writing,” making them particularly valuable training materials for generative AI tools.
OpenAI and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The author’s attorneys, Joseph Savelli and Matthew Butterrick, also announced in January that Sued Stability AI On behalf of the visual artists who have accused the “Parasite” app of defaming their work. Last year, the duo filed a lawsuit against GitHub, accusing it of building its AI-assisted coding tools by stealing the work of programmers.
Huge amounts of money are pouring into the AI space as investors gear up for what is purported to be computing’s next big thing, but commercial applications of the technology have so far been hit and miss. There are many. Efforts to create news articles using generative AI have produced content riddled with basic errors and outright plagiarism.Lawyer also using his ChatGPT for court submissions fined After filling out a brief by concocting a case where the tools don’t exist.
