American stand-up comedian, Sarah Silverman has filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT creator in a US District Court for using the content of her 2010 book titled ‘The Bedwetter.’ The lawsuit accuses the creator of the AI platform of illegal use of the text from the comedian’s book for training their open-source AI model.
Sarah Silverman Sues ChatGPT
Stand-up comedian, actress, and writer, Sarah Silverman has accused open-source AI platform, ChatGPT of illegally using her book to train their AI models. The comedian has joined authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden in two class-action lawsuits for suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement.
According to The Verge, the suit states that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA are trained on illegally-acquired datasets which include their books. The lawsuits claim that these AI models were trained by sourcing the authors’ books from “shadow library” websites such as Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, adding that books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”
The applicants also filed exhibits which show how the AI platform is infringing on their copyrights by summarizing their books. All three authors, including Sarah Silverman, are seeking statutory damages and restitution of profits for various types of copyright infringement, unfair competition, negligence, and unfair enrichment from OpenAI and Meta. It also claims that the authors are among thousand others whose work is being sourced illegally and being taken advantage of.
The legal team representing Silverman, Golden, and Kadrey, LLM Litigation, first filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in June 2023. They had filed a class-action suit on behalf of authors Mona Awad and Paul Trembley claiming that-
“Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT system in March 2023, we’ve been hearing from writers, authors, and publishers who are concerned about its uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials, including thousands of books.”
On July 7, 2023, the same legal team comprising Joseph Saveri and Mathew Butterick filed a second class-action lawsuit against OpenAI representing Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey.
“On behalf of the same three plaintiffs, we’ve also filed an initial class-action lawsuit against Meta challenging LLaMA, a set of large language models trained in part on copyrighted books.”
