Sarah Silverman sues Meta and OpenAI for copyright violations
The American comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with two other authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, have filed lawsuits against Meta Platforms’ LLaMa and OpenAI’s ChatGPT over copyright infringement.
Meta and OpenAI are alleged to have used the plaintiffs’ content for training their respective artificial intelligence (AI) systems without obtaining any prior permission.
According to the court documents against Meta, many of the plaintiffs’ books under copyright appear in the dataset that “Meta has admitted to using to train LLaMA.”
Similarly, in the case against OpenAI, the lawsuit alleges that when ChatGPT generates summaries of the plaintiffs’ work it is an indication of the training via copyrighted content.
In order to obtain this data the suits claim that the companies retrieved the copyrighted data from what are known as “shadow libraries,” such as Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others.
Related: Japanese AI experts raise concern over bots trained on copyrighted material
These shadow libraries are websites that use torrent systems to make books “available in bulk," says the lawsuit. Such sites are illegal and are unlike open-source data that comes from databases such as Gutenberg, which collects books that have copyrights that have run out.
Along with complaints about copyright infringement of their own personal work, the authors filed the complaint on behalf of a class of copyright owners across the United States whose works were also allegedly infringed.
Cointelegraph reached out to OpenAI and Meta for comment on the case, though neither responded prior to publication.
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