This week, comedian Sarah Silverman joined a growing number of writers suing OpenAI, makers of the artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT, for copyright infringement.
Silverman’s lawsuit, in the United States, states that the comedian never gave permission for OpenAI to incorporate the digital version of her 2010 book – “The Bedwetter” – to train its AI models, and points out that it was probably stolen from a “secret”. library” of pirated works.
Silverman’s defense points out that the memoirs were copied “without consent, without credit and without compensation.”
This is one of a growing number of cases that could expose OpenAI and its rivals’ secrecy about valuable data used to train “generative AI” products, increasingly used to create new text, images or songs.
It also raises questions about the ethical and legal basis of these types of tools, which, according to estimates by the McKinsey Global Institute, will contribute between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion to the global economy in the future.
“This is an industry-wide dirty secret. They love data off the books and they get it from these illicit ‘sites.’ We are somehow denouncing this whole practice,” said Matthew Butterick, one of the attorneys representing Silverman. and other authors looking for a class action case.
OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment on the allegations. Another lawsuit from Silverman makes similar claims about an AI model built by Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, which declined to comment.
However, this could be a tough case for writers to win, especially after Google’s success in facing lawsuits over its library of online books.
In 2016, the US Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions that rejected authors’ contention that Google’s digitization of millions of books and showing small portions of them to the public amounted to “infringement.” of copyright on an epic scale”.
“I think what OpenAI has done with books is very close to what Google has been allowed to do with its Google Books project, and therefore it will be legal,” said Deven Desai, a professor of law and ethics at the Institute. of Georgia Technology. .
While only a small group, including Silverman and best-selling novelists Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, have filed lawsuits, concerns about the tech industry’s AI construction practices have gained traction in the literary and art communities.
Other prominent authors, including Nora Roberts, Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, and Jodi Picoult, addressed a letter in June to the CEOs of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and other AI developers, accusing them of exploitative practices in building ‘ chatbots’. ‘ who “imitate and regurgitate” his language, style and ideas.
Source: TSF
