Meta, OpenAI Sued for Copyright Infringement by Comedian Sarah Silverman

Quincy Jon, Tech Times 10 July 2023, 03:07 pm

Meta Platforms and OpenAI are being sued for copyright infringement by comedian Sarah Silverman, and authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden.

The lawsuits, which were filed in federal court in San Francisco, claim that Meta (the parent company of Facebook) and OpenAI utilized their copyrighted information without their consent to train language models for artificial intelligence, NBC News reported.

The class-action cases underscore the legal pitfalls for chatbot developers who employ copyrighted content to make programs that provide convincing users with quick replies.

The authors assert that Meta and OpenAI utilized their works without their permission to train LLaMA and ChatGPT, the corresponding language models for their respective systems.

The lawsuits allege that the authors' contents were consumed and used by the companies in developing their AI chatbots, but they had not given their permission for the language models to be trained using their copyrighted works.

According to reports, the contents of the plaintiffs' books came from "shadow library" websites that the AI-training community has long sought after, per The Guardian.

Implications of AI Chatbot Technology

The legal action raises awareness of the difficulties of applying US copyright law to generative AI applications. Due to their capacity to generate material in response to user requests, platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT and picture generators like DALL-E 2, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney have grown in popularity, according to a Fox News report.

As they are trained to connect user cues with existing information, these systems are exposed to large volumes of data, including text, photos, and videos.

The matter raises questions regarding both the content itself and the possibility of using copyrighted materials without permission while training AI.

The copyright infringement cases brought against Meta Platforms and OpenAI by Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden have not yet received a response from the two tech companies as of present reporting.

As the lawsuits continue, more information will become available about the legal ramifications of using copyrighted content to train AI language models and the repercussions for developers in the chatbot sector.