Authors Are Suing OpenAI and Meta Over Copyright

Generative AI tools offer a range of services, from quite mundane to absolutely fantastic. However, training artificial intelligence requires data that comes from the internet and usually doesn't care for copyright. This is the crux of the AI against humanity war that is happening right now (along with the issue of AI replacing people, of course.)

The companies behind popular AI tools, like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, have been sued before, and Stability AI got hit by Getty Images twice. Now, it's time for the ChatGPT (and DALL-E) creator OpenAI along with Meta.

As reported by The Verge, comedian and author Sarah Silverman together with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey are taking legal action against the companies for copyright infringement. 

They claim that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which, allegedly, were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others.

The authors provide examples of ChatGPT summarizing their books without trying to "reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works."

As for Meta, the plaintiffs say their works were accessible in datasets Meta used to train its LLaMA models. In Meta's paper describing LLaMA, it says the AI's training datasets include ThePile, which is "a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker," which makes it "flagrantly illegal."

The authors' lawsuits point to six counts of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. They are looking for statutory damages, restitution of profits, and more.

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