– Comedian Sarah Silverman, along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement.
– The lawsuits claim that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing the plaintiffs' copyrighted works.
– The books were allegedly obtained from "shadow library" websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, and Z-Library, which distribute books via torrent systems.
– The plaintiffs argue that ChatGPT and LLaMA infringe on their copyrights by summarizing their books without reproducing any copyright management information.
– The separate lawsuit against Meta alleges that the authors' books were accessible in datasets used to train LLaMA models, specifically ThePile, assembled by EleutherAI from the contents of Bibliotik.
– The authors claim that they did not provide consent for their copyrighted books to be used as training material for the AI models.
– The lawsuits include counts of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition, seeking statutory damages and restitution of profits.
– Lawyers Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, representing the authors, have received concerns from writers, authors, and publishers regarding ChatGPT's ability to generate text similar to copyrighted materials.
– The lawsuits pose challenges to the boundaries of copyright and are part of a growing trend of legal cases related to AI technology.
– The Verge reached out to Meta, OpenAI, and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm for comment, but no responses were received at the time of publication.