Sara Silverman is Sue OpenAI and Goalโthe creators of the ChatGPT and LLaMA AI language models, respectivelyโ for stealing information from their book the bed wetteraccording to a pair of lawsuits filed Friday in a US district court.
Silverman joins fellow authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden in the copyright class action lawsuits, which claim that both ChatGPT and LLaMA were trained on their books without the writers' permission. The lawsuits also allege that the models likely received the books from "shadow library" databases such as Library Genesis and Z-Library.
โBooks added by these websites have also been available in bulk through torrent systems,โ one lawsuit claims, adding that โthese flagrantly illegal shadow libraries have long been of interest to the online training community.โ AIโ.
The evidence attached to the OpenAI lawsuit shows that ChatGPT abstracts authors' books when requested, producing a "derivative" work of virtually any copyrighted source.
"If a user requests ChatGPT to abstract a copyrighted book, it will do so," the lawsuit states.
Most compellingly, both lawsuits suggest that the mere existence of these AI models is illegal under Copyright Law, as they must be fed potentially copyrighted information in order to function as intended.
The OpenAI lawsuit questioned "whether ChatGPT itself is an infringing derivative work based on Plaintiffs' copyrighted books."
Similarly, Meta's lawsuit alleges that the LLaMA models are "themselves infringing derivative works" as they "cannot function without the expressive information extracted from Plaintiffs' Infringing Works."
While these class action lawsuits only include the three plaintiffs, they allege that "there are at least thousands of members of the Class" in the United States whose copyrights are potentially being infringed by the AI โโlanguage models.
Attorneys for the law firm Joseph Saveri and attorney Matthew Butterick, who are representing the three authors, did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast's requests for comment.
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