Extract from Doug Austin’s article “OpenAI is Now Getting Hit With Copyright Lawsuits. No Joke!: Artificial Intelligence Trends”
It was inevitable. OpenAI is now getting hit with copyright lawsuits, including one from a famous comedian. See what she did there?
According to Law & Crime (ChatGPT, Meta used illegal ‘shadow library’ websites to train AI using Sarah Silverman’s ‘Bedwetter’ book: Lawsuit, written by Marisa Sarnoff and available here), in a class action complaint filed in federal court Friday, Sarah Silverman accused tech company OpenAI of using her book “The Bedwetter” to train its ChatGPT software — and, in doing so, violating her copyright. Author Christopher Golden and writer Richard Kadrey joined Silverman in the lawsuit.
According to the complaint, ChatGPT accessed databases of thousands of books in order to “train” its programs — called “large language models, or LLMs — “by copying massive amounts of text and extracting expressive information from it.” This training, the lawsuit explains, is the key to allowing ChatGPT to “emit convincingly naturalistic text outputs in response to user prompts.”
The problem, however, is that the “training” material — including, allegedly, Silverman’s book — is under copyright, and may have been pulled from databases of copyrighted works without permission.
“Plaintiffs and Class members did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material for ChatGPT,” the lawsuit says. “Nonetheless, their copyrighted materials were ingested and used to train ChatGPT.”
