Comedian Sarah Silverman is suing Facebook parent company Meta as well as ChatGPT firm OpenAI for copyright infringement, claiming they used her content without permission to train artificial intelligence language models.
Sarah Silverman filed the lawsuits along with authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden in a San Francisco federal court Friday, according to multiple reports.
The suits could open the doors to a flood of litigation surrounding A.I. technology, which relies on pre-existing texts, audio, video, and other forms of content to train A.I. chatbots to feel more human. Much of this content is copyrighted and may not fall under fair-use laws.
Among the more provocative allegations reportedly brought by the suits is the claim that A.I. models are inherently illegal under the Copyright Act because they rely on potentially copyrighted content in order to work.
Silverman’s complaint reportedly alleges that leaked information about Meta’s A.I. business shows her work and those of the co-plaintiffs were used without permission.
The suit against OpenAI claims ChatGPT appears to have been trained on their copyrighted content.
“The summaries get some details wrong” but still show that ChatGPT “retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset,” the lawsuit reportedly states.
OpenAI is backed by Microsoft to the tune of several billion dollars.
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at
