Popular comedian and author sues ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

Comedian Sarah Silverman, along with authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, has filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) and OpenAI. The lawsuits, filed in San Francisco federal court on Friday, claim that Meta and OpenAI used their copyrighted content without permission to train artificial intelligence language models, specifically chatbots.

These legal actions highlight the potential legal risks faced by developers of chatbots when utilizing copyrighted material to create AI applications that generate realistic responses to user queries.

Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden assert that Meta and OpenAI used their books without authorization to develop their large language models, which are marketed as powerful tools for automating tasks by simulating human conversation.

According to the lawsuit against Meta, leaked information about the company's AI business suggests that the plaintiffs' work was utilized without their permission.

In the lawsuit against OpenAI, the plaintiffs claim that the summaries generated by ChatGPT, the company's language model, indicate that it was trained on their copyrighted content. Although the summaries may contain some inaccuracies, they still demonstrate that ChatGPT retained knowledge of specific works from the training dataset, as stated in the lawsuit.

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The lawsuits aim to obtain unspecified monetary damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly infringed upon by Meta and OpenAI.

The outcome of these lawsuits will shed light on the legal boundaries and responsibilities of developers when utilizing copyrighted material in training AI models, and may have implications for the broader AI and tech industry.

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