Comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, have filed two separate copyright infringement lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI. The lawsuits allege that Meta and OpenAI used the authors’ content without permission to train their artificial intelligence language models.
The first lawsuit, filed in San Francisco federal court on Friday, names Meta as the defendant. The plaintiffs allege that Meta used their books to train its chat bot, LLaMA. The lawsuit cites leaked information about Meta’s artificial intelligence business as evidence that the company used the authors’ content without permission.
The second lawsuit also filed in San Francisco federal court on Friday, names OpenAI as the defendant. The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI used their books to train its chat bot, ChatGPT. The lawsuit cites summaries of the plaintiffs’ work generated by ChatGPT as evidence that the bot was trained on their copyrighted content.
Both lawsuits seek unspecified monetary damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly infringed.
The lawsuits highlight the legal risks that developers of chat bots face when using troves of copyrighted material to create apps that deliver realistic responses to user prompts. The lawsuits also raise questions about the extent to which copyright law protects the use of copyrighted material in the training of artificial intelligence models.
It remains to be seen how the courts will rule on these lawsuits. However, the lawsuits are a sign that copyright owners are increasingly willing to take legal action against companies that they believe are using their content without permission.
