Comedian Sarah Silverman has joined a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and another against Meta accusing the companies of copyright infringement, saying they “copied and devoured” her protected work to train their artificial intelligence programs, according to court papers.
The lawsuitswherein he joined the authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, was filed Friday in the San Francisco Division of the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Each suit alleges that the company in question made copies of the authors’ works, including Silverman’s memoir, “The Bedwetter,” without permission by scraping illegally online “shadow libraries” containing the texts of thousands of books.
The lawsuit against Meta names the company own research paper about LLaMA, the large language model it uses to train chatbots. According to the paper, which was made public in February, the scientists included text from The Pile within their training dataset; the lawsuit says some of that text came from shadow libraries.
“Their copyrighted materials were copied and consumed as part of the training,” the lawsuit states. “Many of the plaintiff’s books appear in the dataset that Meta admits to using.”
Neither OpenAI nor Meta responded to requests for comment on the lawsuits on Monday. The plaintiffs are seeking awards for damages and injunctive relief that may include changes to the LLaMA and ChatGPT programs.
Less is known about the source of the training datasets for OpenAI’s ChatGPT program. But the lawsuit states that ChatGPT’s ability to generate summaries of plaintiffs’ works is “only possible if ChatGPT is trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”
The text it generated as a requested summary of Silverman’s memoir, “The Bedwetter,” is included as an exhibit.
“One of the main subjects in the early part of the diary is Silverman’s struggle with enuresis, or bedwetting, which extended into his teenage years,” the program wrote. “This issue caused her great anxiety and embarrassment, but it also strengthened her resilience and ability to face adversity.”
Attorneys representing the three authors, Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, are also representing other creators in separate litigation challenging Copilot, an artificial intelligence-powered coding assistant on GitHub and an image generator made of Stability AI.
Naa website in publicizing their litigation against the AI companies, the lawyers asserted that “much of the material in the training datasets used by OpenAI and Meta comes from copyrighted works – including books written by plaintiff – copied by OpenAI and Meta without permission, without credit, and without compensation.”
The dual case is among a growing number of legal actions that could define the boundaries of how artificial intelligence learns, and what role copyright laws will play in material used by algorithms for datasets. training.
“I expect more to come,” said Robert deBrauwere, who specializes in digital media and intellectual property at the law firm Pryor Cashman, where he is a partner. He was not involved in the Silverman case.