The lawsuits claim that the works were obtained from a "shadow library"
Popular comedian Sarah Silverman along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey are suing OpenAI and Meta in a US District Court over claims of copyright infringement, The Verge reported.
The lawsuits claim that Meta and OpenAI used their copyrighted content without permission to train AI language models, specifically chatbots.
The lawsuit claims that the three authors "did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material for ChatGPT. Nonetheless, their copyrighted materials were ingested and used to train ChatGPT."
According to a report by The Guardian, the lawsuit concerning Meta claims that "many" of the authors' copyrighted books appear in the dataset that the Facebook and Instagram owners used to train LLaMA, a group of Meta-owned AI models.
LLaMa is a "foundational large language model" designed to help AI research. In other words, it's a very big AI system that can be put to use in a range of tasks.
The lawsuits claim that the works were obtained from a "shadow library" that contains the texts of thousands of books.
The plaintiffs in their lawsuit against OpenAI claim that when prompted, ChatGPT will summarize three books: Silverman's The Bedwetter, Ararat by Golden, and Kadrey's Sandman Slim. The claim says that the chatbot never bothered to "reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works."
Lawyers Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, who are representing the three authors have written that since the release of ChatGPT, they have been hearing from writers, authors and publishers expressing concerns about the tool's uncanny ability to generate text similar to copyrighted material, the media outlet reported.
Mr Saveri and Mr Butterick are also representing two more authors, Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, who have filed a separate class action lawsuit against OpenAI claiming ChatGPT was trained on their work without the writers' consent, The Guardian reported.
Getty Images is also suing the company behind AI image generator Stable Diffusion over an alleged breach of copyright.
The lawyers are also representing three artists- Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz - in a lawsuit against image generators Stability AI, Midjourney and Deviant Art.
OpenAI and Meta have not commented on this issue.