© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Sarah Silverman performs the musical “Mr. Saturday Night” at the 75th Annual Tony Awards in New York City, US, on June 12, 2022. REUTERS/Brendan McDiarmid/File Photo
by Jack Quinn
(Reuters) — Comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against the Meta and OpenAI platforms for allegedly using their content without permission to train artificial intelligence language models.
The proposed class action lawsuit filed by Silverman, Richard Cadre and Christopher Golden in federal court in San Francisco on Friday alleges that Facebook (NASDAQ:) parent company Meta and OpenAI maker ChatGPT used copyrighted materials to train chatbots.
Meta and OpenAI, a private company backed by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:) did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
The lawsuits underscore the legal risks that chat software developers face when using collections of copyrighted material to create apps that provide realistic responses to user claims.
Silverman, Kadrey, Golden allege Meta, and OpenAI used their books without permission to develop so-called big language models, which their creators present 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 work shows that their work was used without permission.
The lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that plaintiffs’ work summaries generated by ChatGPT indicated that the bot was trained on copyrighted content.
“The abstracts incorrectly sum up some details,” the suit says, but still shows that ChatGPT “retains knowledge of certain actions in the training dataset.”
The lawsuits seek unspecified monetary damages on behalf of a class of nationwide copyright holders whose work was allegedly infringed.
