Comedian Sarah Silverman, along with authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, has initiated class action lawsuits against Meta Platforms (parent company of Facebook) and OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuits claim that both Meta and OpenAI used copyrighted material without permission to train their artificial intelligence (AI) language models used in chat bots.

The legal actions underscore the potential legal risks faced by developers of chat bots who rely on copyrighted material to create realistic and engaging conversational experiences for users.

The lawsuits argue that Meta and OpenAI utilized the plaintiffs’ copyrighted books to develop their respective “large language models,” which are marketed as powerful tools capable of automating tasks by simulating human conversation.

The lawsuit against Meta Platforms alleges that leaked information about the company’s AI business reveals unauthorized usage of the plaintiffs’ work. It suggests that Meta employed the copyrighted material without obtaining proper authorization.

In the case against OpenAI, the lawsuit contends that ChatGPT, the chat bot model developed by OpenAI, generated summaries of the plaintiffs’ works. These summaries indicate that the bot was trained on the copyrighted content authored by Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden. Although there may be some inaccuracies in the generated summaries, the lawsuit claims they still demonstrate that ChatGPT has acquired knowledge of specific works included in its training dataset.

The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified monetary damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly infringed upon by Meta and OpenAI. The objective of the lawsuits is to address the unauthorized use of copyrighted material and obtain compensation for the affected copyright holders.