Sarah Silverman Sues OpenAI for Copyright Infringement

OpenAI is really starting to feel the heat.

Silverman Suit

The debate surrounding the use of AI chatbots and copyright is really starting to heat up.

Case in point, comedian and author Sarah Silverman has filed a lawsuit, alongside two other authors, against OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement, The Guardian reports.

They're claiming that OpenAI's very popular ChatGPT and Meta's own AI model LLaMA were trained on their books as dataset fodder, without their consent.

It's yet another legal challenge to the development of AI chatbots, and particularly how they're based on data collected by scraping the web without compensating creators. But whether Silverman will be able to successfully prove in court that ChatGPT violated her copyright remains to be seen.

Plagiarism Bot

In their lawsuit, Silverman and her fellow plaintiffs, best-selling fiction writers Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, claim that when you enter certain prompts into ChatGPT, the chatbot "generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works — something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works."

"Defendants, by and through the use of ChatGPT, benefit commercial and profit richly from the use of Plaintiffs’ and Class members’ copyrighted materials," the suit reads.

According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT was able to not only summarize Silverman's book "The Bedwetter," but even reproduced entire passages verbatim.

Fuming Artists

This is just the latest suit by writers and artists who are alarmed that AI models are using their work without consent. Earlier this year, a group of artists sued Stability AI, creator of the image generator Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney for using their art to train AI.

Getty Images is also suing Stability AI for copyright infringement due to its stock photos being included in the training data for Stable Diffusion.

OpenAI is really starting to feel the heat. Last month, a California-based law firm launched a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing that ChatGPT violated the copyrights of countless people.

It remains to be seen if these lawsuits can metaphorically put the toothpaste back into the tube, because AI developers like OpenAI have already conquered large swaths of the public imagination and our wallets.

But there's clearly plenty of growing resentment among artists who feel that OpenAI and Meta profited off their work without offering compensation.

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