Sarah Silverman sues OpenAI, Meta over use of her book in training AI programs

Sarah Silverman is among three authors suing Meta and OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, saying that the companies’ artificial intelligence (AI) programs were “knowingly and secretly trained” using unauthorized copies of their books.

The pair of proposed class action lawsuits were filed Friday in San Francisco federal court by the comedian, as well as writers Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey.

The lawsuit against OpenAI, the creator of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, claims that “much of the material” used to train the tool “comes from copyrighted works — including books written by Plaintiffs — that were copied by OpenAI without consent, without credit, and without compensation.”

When a user prompts ChatGPT to “summarize books written by” Silverman and the other two authors, the lawsuit says, it “generated very accurate summaries.” But, it says, “The summaries get some details wrong.”

The lawsuit against Meta from the 52-year-old “The Bedwetter” author and former star of Hulu’s “I Love You, America with Sarah Silverman” alleges that “much of the material” in the training dataset used to develop its LLaMA large language model “comes from copyrighted works — including books written by Plaintiffs — that were copied by Meta without consent, without credit, and without compensation.”

The lawsuits seek unspecified statutory damages, saying the conduct by OpenAI and Meta has caused and continues to cause “irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money.”

Meta declined ITK’s request for comment, while representatives from OpenAI didn’t immediately respond.

—Updated at 12:25 p.m.

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