Sarah Silverman has filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI and technology giant Meta.
The 52-year-old comic is alleging copyright infringement in the training of their AI systems along with two other authors and is bringing a class-action case against the companies.
Their lawsuit against OpenAI claims their copyrighted materials were used to train ChatGPT without their consent.
The case against Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, relates to their LLaMa AI system, which was leaked online after being initially released to a small group of users focused on research.
The authors argue their books were included in a dataset compiled by another organisation and used to train the LLaMa system.
Legal experts assisting the group, Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, who are already involved in a previous case against OpenAI, suggest the cases may come down to determining whether training a large language model constitutes fair use or not.
The lawyers stated: “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.”
But some legal experts have raised doubts about whether OpenAI can be accused of copying books.
Last year, the same law firm initiated two cases on behalf of programmers and artists who believed that their rights had been infringed by AI systems.
Meta declined to comment on the matter, while OpenAI has yet to respond to questions regarding the lawsuit, the outcome of which is set to have wide-reaching implications for the legal boundaries surrounding the use of copyrighted materials in training AI models.
