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Lawsuits were filed by Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden in San Francisco federal court |
Comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Meta Platforms and OpenAI for allegedly using their content without permission to train artificial intelligence language models.
The proposed class action lawsuits filed by Silverman,
Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden in San Francisco federal court Friday
allege Facebook parent company Meta and ChatGPT maker OpenAI used copyrighted
material to train chatbots.
Meta and OpenAI, a private company backed by Microsoft, did
not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
The lawsuits underscore the legal risks developers of
chatbots face when using troves of copyrighted material to create apps that
deliver realistic responses to user prompts.
Silverman, Kadrey and Golden allege Meta and OpenAI used
their books without authorisation to develop their so-called large language
models, which their makers pitch as powerful tools for automating tasks by
replicating human conversation.
In their lawsuit against Meta, the plaintiffs allege that
leaked information about the company's artificial intelligence business shows
their work was used without permission.
The lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that summaries of the
plaintiffs' work generated by ChatGPT indicate the bot was trained on their
copyrighted content.
“The summaries get some details wrong” but still show that
ChatGPT “retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset,"
the lawsuit says.
The lawsuits seek unspecified money damages on behalf of a
nationwide class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly infringed. © Reuters