Sarah Silverman Sues ChatGPT For Copying Her Work
Stand-up comedian, actress, and writer Sarah Silverman has taken legal action against artificial intelligence developers. Citing copyright infringement, she is suing ChatGPT developer Open AI and Meta, claiming that their AI models used her work without consent. According to The Guardian, the 52-year-old star and former Saturday Night Live cast member has accused these companies of unauthorized use of her content to train their AI systems.
Sarah Silverman is joining two authors in suing OpenAI over ChatGPT using their books without permission.
Authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey have joined Sarah Silverman in initiating legal action against OpenAI and Meta. They allege that these organizations have trained their AI models, ChatGPT and LLaMA, on datasets illegally obtained from “shadow library” websites, including Bibliotik, Library Genesis, and Z-Library, which contain their works.
The suits further note that their books are accessible in large quantities via torrent systems.
In their lawsuit against OpenAI, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey have provided evidence demonstrating that ChatGPT summarizes their copyrighted books when prompted.
Silverman’s book Bedwetter is seen as the first instance, followed by Golden’s Ararat and Kadrey’s Sandman Slim examples. The claim says the AI chatbot does not acknowledge the copyright management information included in their published works.
Apart from the suit against OpenAI over ChatGPT, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey have filed a lawsuit against Meta, claiming that their books were used in the datasets for training Meta’s LLaMA models.
These models are a group of open-source artificial intelligence models launched by the company in February. The lawsuit details the belief that these datasets, one of which is named ThePile and assembled by EleutherAI, originated illicitly, citing an EleutherAI paper that pointed out that ThePile was compiled from “a copy of contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.”
Sarah Silverman’s book, Bedwetter, can be summarized by ChatGPT, which was trained off a database that incldued an illegal copy.
Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, attorneys for Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey, report receiving concerns from various writers and publishers about ChatGPT’s unnerving capacity to generate text mirroring copyrighted content.
The same lawyers also represent authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay in a distinct class-action suit against OpenAI, alleging unauthorized usage of their work for training ChatGPT. Additionally, Saveri and Butterick represent artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karala Ortiz in a lawsuit targeting image generators Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt.
Sarah Silverman joins a growing list of celebrities raising copyright infringement issues with AI systems like ChatGPT.
Sarah Silverman Is The Latest Celebrity To Sue OpenAI
Earlier this year, legal representatives of the renowned ex-NFL quarterback Tom Brady, reportedly issued a cease-and-desist notice to comedians Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen. The comedians produced an hour-long video featuring an AI-created image of Brady for a fictitious comedy special, done without the athlete’s consent.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence will likely lead to a rise in legal disputes against AI systems like ChatGPT. These cases not only present significant challenges for AI organizations such as OpenAI but also stretch traditional copyright laws’ limits.
The legal action taken by Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey underscores the emerging trend in litigation against AI, suggesting they are neither the first nor will they be the last to do so.
