This Comedian is suing Open AI

 

In a groundbreaking lawsuit that has captivated the tech and entertainment industries, a prominent comedian and author has taken legal action against OpenAI, one of the leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence. The lawsuit alleges copyright infringement and raises significant questions about the use of AI models trained on copyrighted books without proper authorization.

Filed in a US District Court, the lawsuit accuses OpenAI of utilizing illicitly-acquired datasets that include copyrighted works, obtained from "shadow library" websites known for distributing copyrighted material through torrent systems. The comedian and author argue that OpenAI's ChatGPT, a popular AI model, summarily infringes upon their copyrights by providing unauthorized summaries of their books upon request. This high-profile legal battle challenges the boundaries of copyright law in the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence.

Renowned comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta, two prominent companies in the field of artificial intelligence. The lawsuits, filed in a US District Court, allege copyright infringement on the part of both OpenAI and Meta.

According to the lawsuits, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's LLaMA, their respective AI models, were trained using datasets that included the copyrighted works of the plaintiffs. The authors claim that these datasets were acquired without permission from "shadow library" websites, such as Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others. These websites are known for distributing copyrighted material via torrent systems, enabling unauthorized access to books.

While authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuit, Sarah Silverman's team has not responded to inquiries at the time of this report.

The lawsuit against OpenAI includes exhibits demonstrating that ChatGPT, when prompted, provides summaries of the plaintiffs' books, thereby infringing upon their copyrights. In the exhibits, Silverman's book "Bedwetter" is the first example summarized by ChatGPT, followed by Golden's "Ararat" and Kadrey's "Sandman Slim." The authors assert that the chatbot failed to reproduce any of the copyright management information contained in their published works.

The separate lawsuit against Meta claims that the plaintiffs' books were incorporated into the datasets used to train Meta's LLaMA models, a set of open-source AI models introduced by the company earlier this year.

The lawsuit presents a series of steps outlining the plaintiffs' belief that the datasets used by Meta have illicit origins. In a Meta paper discussing LLaMA, the company references sources for its training datasets, one of which is known as "ThePile," assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile, as highlighted in the complaint, is described in an EleutherAI paper as being compiled from "a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker." The lawsuit argues that Bibliotik and the other listed "shadow libraries" are blatantly illegal.

Both lawsuits assert that the authors did not provide consent for their copyrighted works to be used as training material for the companies' AI models. The legal claims put forward by the authors encompass six counts, including various copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. The plaintiffs seek statutory damages, restitution of profits, and other remedies.

Lawyers Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, representing the three authors, have stated on their LLMlitigation website that they have received numerous concerns from writers, authors, and publishers regarding ChatGPT's ability to generate text similar to copyrighted material, including thousands of books.

Joseph Saveri has previously initiated litigation against AI companies on behalf of programmers and artists. Getty Images also filed a lawsuit alleging that Stability AI, creators of the AI image generation tool Stable Diffusion, trained their model on "millions of images protected by copyright." Saveri and Butterick are also representing authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay in a similar case involving the company's chatbot.

These lawsuits not only present significant challenges for OpenAI, Meta, and other AI companies but also raise questions about the boundaries of copyright law. As the legal landscape surrounding AI continues to evolve, it is likely that similar lawsuits will emerge, shaping the future of copyright in relation to artificial intelligence.

At the time of publication, attempts to obtain comments from Meta, OpenAI, and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm have been unsuccessful.