Meta, OpenAI Sued For Alleged Copyright Infringement

(RTTNews) - AI chatbot creators Meta Platforms and OpenAI have been sued by comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors alleging copyright infringement for use of their content without permission to train artificial intelligence language model.

In the proposed class action lawsuits filed in San Francisco federal court, Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden allege the companies used information from their books to use in their large language models without authorization to develop generative artificial intelligence or AI businesses. These open-source AI models are considered as the powerful tools for automating tasks by replicating human conversation.

Facebook parent Meta is the creator of AI chatbot LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), while OpenAI, supported by Microsoft Corp, is behind highly popular generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.

Silverman has sued OpenAI for unauthorized use of her 2010 book "The Bedwetter." She has joined authors Kadrey and Golden in two class-action lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI.

According to the plaintiffs' lawsuit, leaked information about Meta's AI business shows that their work was used without permission. Further, against OpenAI, the lawsuit alleges that summaries of the plaintiffs' work generated by ChatGPT shows that the chatbot was trained on their content, which has copyrights.

The companies were also accused that they have infringed works of various other copyright owners across the United States.

As per the lawsuit, the summaries get some details wrong, but still show that ChatGPT retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset.

In the suits, Silverman and the two authors seek statutory damages and restitution of profits.

The recently emerged generative AI technologies, compared to its predecessor machine learning methods such as analytical AI, have the ability to generate novel, human-like output rather than merely describe or interpret existing information, and also have approachable interfaces to understand and respond with natural language, images, audio, and video.

Meanwhile, with the emergence of a new wave of highly capable AI chatbots, concerns are also rising regarding the potential for AI systems to surpass human capabilities and operate without control. Governments worldwide are rushing to establish regulations for AI technologies.