OpenAI, Meta Sued For Copyright Infringement By Sarah Silverman & Others

According to the authors, the chatbot never bothered to “reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works.”

New Delhi: American comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.

Complaint Against ChatGPT

According to the suit, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”

When prompted, ChatGPT will summarize their books, infringing on their copyrights, as per the authors. While Silverman’s Bedwetter is the first book shown being summarized by ChatGPT in the exhibits, Golden’s book Ararat and Kadrey’s Sandman Slim are also part of the suit.

According to the authors, the chatbot never bothered to “reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works.”

Complaint Against Meta

In the lawsuit against Meta, it’s alleged that the authors’ books were accessible in datasets Meta used to train its LLaMA models, a quartet of open-source AI Models the company introduced in February.

The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the datasets have illicit origins —

In Meta’s description on LLaMA, the company says one of the sources of its training datasets is ThePile, which was assembled by a company called EleutherAI.

As per the complaint, ThePile was described in an EleutherAI paper as being put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed, says the lawsuit, are “flagrantly illegal.”

In both claims, the authors say that they “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material” for the companies’ AI models. Their lawsuits each contain six counts of various types of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. The authors are looking for statutory damages, restitution of profits, and more.

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