OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is stealing “massive amounts” of personal information to train it artificial intelligence Supermodels in an unconcerned search for profits, a group of anonymous individuals have claimed in a lawsuit seeking class action status.
OpenAI violated privacy laws by scraping 300 billion passwords from the Internet, eavesdropping on “books, articles, websites and publications — including personal information obtained without consent,” according to the sprawling 157-page paper. lawsuit. Don’t shy away from sweeping language, accusing the company of risking “civilization collapse.”
In the suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, Clarkson Law Firm said the plaintiffs are described by their occupations or interests, but identified by initials only for fear of a backlash against them. They cited a potential $3 billion in damages, based on the class of affected individuals which they estimate to be in the millions.
A different approach: theft
Despite the protocols in place for the purchase and use of personal information, the defendants took a different approach: theft“they claim. The company’s popularity Chat bot ChatGPT and other products are trained on private information taken from what plaintiffs describe as hundreds of millions of Internet users, including children, without their permission.
Microsoft Corp., which plans to invest $13 billion in OpenAI, is also named as a defendant.
An OpenAI spokesperson did not immediately return a call or email seeking comment on the lawsuit. A Microsoft spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email.
ChatGPT and other generative AI applications have sparked intense interest in the technology’s promise, but it’s also sparked a firestorm over privacy and misinformation. Congress debates the potential and risks of artificial intelligence as products raise questions About the future of the creative industries and the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in testimony on Capitol Hill last month, called for the regulation of AI. But the lawsuit focuses on how OpenAI got its product guts in the first place.
Umbilical scraping
OpenAI, which spearheads the booming industry, is accused in the lawsuit of conducting a massive secret web scraping operation, violating terms of service agreements and state and federal privacy and property laws. One of the laws cited is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal anti-piracy law that has been invoked in overturning disputes before. The suit also includes claims of invasion of privacy, theft, unlawful enrichment, and violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI is illegally misappropriating personal data on a massive scale to win the “artificial intelligence arms race,” and is illegally accessing private information from individuals’ interactions with its products and from apps that have integrated ChatGPT. These integrations allow the company to collect photo and location data from Snapchat, music preferences on Spotify, financial information from Stripe and private conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams, according to the lawsuit.
In pursuit of profits, OpenAI abandoned its original principle of developing AI “in the manner most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” the plaintiffs allege. The lawsuit puts ChatGPT’s expected revenue for 2023 at $200 million.
While seeking to represent the vast class of individuals allegedly harmed, and seeking monetary damages to be determined at trial, the plaintiffs are also asking the court to freeze commercial access to and further development of OpenAI products.