Sarah Silverman and other authors sue ChatGPT creator over claims it stole their texts

Artificial Intelligence The Courts (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Two of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence firms are being sued by celebrities including Sarah Silverman.

The writers claim that ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Facebook parent company Meta used their text to train their artificial intelligence systems, without permission.

“Since the release of OpenAI’s Chat­GPT sys­tem in March 2023, we’ve been hear­ing from writ­ers, authors, and pub­lish­ers who are con­cerned about its uncanny abil­ity to gen­er­ate text sim­i­lar to that found in copy­righted tex­tual mate­ri­als, includ­ing thou­sands of books,” wrote Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, the lawyers behind the class-action complaint.

Mr Saveri and Mr Butterick have already launched legal proceedings against GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant, as well as Stable Diffusion, the popular AI image generator. They call the systems “industrial-strength plagiarists” on a website built to track and promote that work that also includes the complaints that have been filed in California.

Last week, the two lawyers launched class-action lawsuits against OpenAI, arguing that it was remixing the “copy­righted works of thou­sands of book authors—and many oth­ers—with­out con­sent, com­pen­sa­tion, or credit”. That complaint was initially launched on behalf of two authors, Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, who have since been joined by Sarah Silverman, Chris Golden and Richard Kadrey.

The lawsuit alleges that their work had been downloaded from “shadow library” websites that make it possible to download large amounts of text in bulk. They were then used to train the ChatGPT and LLaMa systems made by Meta and OpenAI, it claims.

The suit shows that ChatGPT will summarise those authors’ books when prompted, infringing copyright and not giving any of the copyright information about the books, the lawyers claim. The authors “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material”, the lawsuit says.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent. Meta declined to comment.