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No kidding: Comedian and author Sarah Silverman is a lead plaintiff in two lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI, accusing the tech companies of illegally using copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence systems.
Books cited in the lawsuits include Silverman’s best-selling 2010 memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee. The federal lawsuits, filed Friday, July 7, allege that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA both ingested text from The Bedwetter and other works to train their Large Language Models (LLMs) — without the consent of ( or compensation) by authors such as Silbermann.
Meta and OpenAI representatives did not respond to Variety’s request for comment.
Silverman is one of three authors named as plaintiffs, along with writer Christopher Golden (whose books include Ararat) and Richard Kadrey, author of the supernatural noir series Sandman Slim. The lawsuits — filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division — are seeking class action status and unspecified monetary damages. A copy of the lawsuit against Meta can be found at this link and the lawsuit against OpenAI can be found at this link. The three authors’ attorneys, Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI last month on behalf of authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad.
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022. Based in San Francisco, OpenAI is a private research lab developing AI technologies and was founded as a non-profit organization in 2015 by Elon Musk (who is no longer on the OpenAI board) and CEO Sam Altman.
Although OpenAI has not specified what is contained in its datasets for ChatGPT, the lawsuit against the company states that the only “internet-based book corpora” ever contained the amount of material believed to be used by OpenAI are “blatantly illegal shadow libraries” (which allegedly contain plaintiffs’ copyrighted work). The complaint alleged that when asked to summarize the books authored by each plaintiff, ChatGPT produced very accurate summaries…which means ChatGPT retains knowledge of specific works in the training dataset and can output similar textual content. At no time did ChatGPT reproduce any of the copyright administration information that the plaintiffs included with their published works.”
In their lawsuit against Meta, plaintiffs’ attorneys alleged that the company copied an extensive book record containing the works of the three named authors to train the Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA) language models.
Silverman is a two-time Emmy-winning comedian, actor, writer, and producer. In spring 2022, her off-Broadway musical adaptation of The Bedwetter sold out at Atlantic Theater Co. She currently hosts The Sarah Silverman Podcast and will host TBS’s upcoming show Stupid Pet Tricks, an offshoot of David Letterman’s famous late-night segment.