Comedian Sarah Silverman and two authors have sued Meta Platforms and OpenAI for allegedly utilising their content without permission to train AI language models.

Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden filed proposed class action lawsuits in San Francisco federal court Friday (July 7) alleging that Facebook parent company Meta and ChatGPT developer OpenAI misappropriated copyrighted information to teach chatbots.

The lawsuits highlight the legal issues that chatbot developers confront when employing vast amounts of copyrighted content to make programs that respond realistically to user prompts.

Meta and OpenAI, according to Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden, exploited their books without permission to construct their so-called large language models, which their creators tout as strong tools for automating jobs by duplicating human interaction.

In their lawsuit against Meta, the plaintiffs allege that leaked information about the company’s artificial intelligence business shows their work was used without permission.

The lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that summaries of the plaintiffs’ work generated by ChatGPT indicate the bot was trained on their copyrighted content.

“The summaries get some details wrong,” but still show that ChatGPT “retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset," the lawsuit says.

The lawsuits seek unspecified money damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly infringed.

Earlier last week, The Guardian reported that authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay had also filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the organisation breached copyright law by “training” its model on their novels without permission.

According to Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex, this was the first lawsuit against the OpenAI tool that concerns copyright.

“The complaint said that OpenAI ‘unfairly’ profits from ‘stolen writing and ideas’ and calls for monetary damages on behalf of all US-based authors whose works were allegedly used to train ChatGPT. Though authors with copyrighted works have ‘great legal protection’, said Saveri and Butterick, they are confronting companies ‘like OpenAI who behave as if these laws don’t apply to them’,” as per The Guardian.

(With inputs from Reuters)

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)