Comedian Sarah Silverman this week joined a growing number of writers suing OpenAI, makers of artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT, for copyright infringement.
Silverman’s lawsuit in the United States argues that the comedian never allowed OpenAI to include the digital version of her 2010 book – “The Bedwetter” – to train its AI models, pointing out that it was likely stolen from a “secret library” of pirated works.
Silverman’s defense insists that the memoir was copied “without permission, without credit and without compensation.”
This is one of a growing number of cases that could expose the secret of OpenAI and its rivals about the valuable data used to train “generative AI” products, which are increasingly being used to create new lyrics, images or songs. to make.
It also raises questions about the ethical and legal basis of such tools, which the McKinsey Global Institute estimates will add between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion to the global economy in the future.
“This is an industry-wide dirty secret. They love book data and they get it on these illegal ‘sites.’ Somehow we’re exposing this whole practice,” said Matthew Butterick, one of the attorneys representing Silverman and represents others. authors in pursuit of a class action lawsuit.
OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment on the allegations. Another Silverman lawsuit makes similar claims about an AI model built by Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, which declined to comment.
However, this can be a tough case for writers to win, especially after Google’s success when it faced lawsuits over its online book library.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 upheld lower court decisions that rejected authors’ claims that Google’s digitizing millions of books and showing small portions of them to the public amounted to “copyright infringement 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,” defended Deven Desai, a professor of law and ethics at the Institute of Technology of Georgia. .
While only a small group, including Silverman and best-selling authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, have gone to court, concerns about the tech industry’s AI building practices have gained traction in the literary and artistic communities.
Other prominent authors, such as 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 the construction of ‘chat bots’. who “mimicate and regurgitate” their language, style, and ideas.
Source: DN
