- Two additional lawsuits added.
Updated July 10, 2023:
Behind the lawsuits are Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, the legal team already suing Github Copilot and Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement. The lawyers leave no doubt that they consider the unsolicited use of code and images from the Internet for AI training to be theft.
They are now applying this logic to authors whose texts were part of the training material: "Since the March 2023 release of OpenAI's ChatGPT system, we have heard from writers, authors, and publishers concerned about the system's uncanny ability to generate texts similar to those in copyrighted textual material, including thousands of books."
Saveri and Butterick are representing authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Award in a lawsuit against OpenAI (see below), alleging that ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 "remix" the works of thousands of book authors without consent, payment, or credit.
The attorneys are also representing comedian Sarah Silverman, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey in a second class action lawsuit against OpenAI over the same issue. The three authors are having Saveri and Butterick file another class action lawsuit against Meta, whose LLaMA language model was also trained with copyrighted books.
LLaMA has provided the technical basis for numerous open-source models, some of which are marketed commercially. Meta plans to make LLaMA v2 the center of open-source development as well.
Original article, July 5, 2023:
OpenAI is facing lawsuits over web scraping and copyright infringement, with one class-action lawsuit alleging the AI company is misappropriating personal data on an unprecedented scale and another claiming its ChatGPT AI model is being trained on copyrighted books without the authors' permission.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, says OpenAI's ChatGPT and DALL-E AI programs collect "stolen private information" from millions of Internet users, including children, without their consent. OpenAI is also accused of secretly violating terms of service agreements, as well as state and federal privacy and property laws. Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, is listed as a defendant in the case.
