Comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey are suing Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement.
The class action lawsuits, filed in San Francisco Federal Court, claim that the authors’ work was used without their permission to train artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots, namely Facebook’s LLaMA and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The alleged copyright infringement relates to Silverman’s book The Bedwetter and works by Ararat author Golden and Sandman Slim author Kadrey.
Regarding ChatGPT, the authors claim their copyrighted materials were “ingested and used to train ChatGPT” and, when prompted can generate summaries of their copyrighted works.
“The summaries get some details wrong. Still, the rest of the summaries are accurate, which means that ChatGPT retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset as is able to output similar textual content,” the lawsuit claims.
In their claim against Meta, they argue their copyright materials are included in the “training dataset” used to train LLaMA.
The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, and other remedies, according to the lawsuits.
The lawsuits are being led by San Francisco legal firm Joseph Saveri and lawyer and author Matthew Butterick who are also representing authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad in a separate class action case against OpenAI.
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