Comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey have filed separate lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement. The complaints allege that the companies trained their AI models, ChatGPT and LLaMA, using datasets that included unauthorized copies of the authors' works. The pair of lawsuits, filed in federal court in San Francisco on Friday, are seeking class-action status and unspecified statutory damages. - In both claims, the plaintiffs argue that they "did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material" for the companies' AI models.
- According to the complaint against OpenAI, ChatGPT produced mostly accurate summaries of the authors' works, including Silverman's "The Bedwetter," when prompted.
- Similarly, Meta's LLaMA language model is accused of incorporating copyrighted material without consent, credit, or compensation.
- The lawsuits include various counts of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. Both Meta and OpenAI have yet to comment.
OpenAI trains its large language models by scraping internet text, including hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, some of them obtained from illegal "shadow library" websites like Bibliotik. - In late June, a California law firm filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of infringing upon copyrights and violating privacy by using scraped data from the web to train ChatGPT.
- The lawsuit also tests the theory that OpenAI violated the rights of millions of internet users by using their content without permission.
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