Comedian Sarah Silverman has teamed up with two authors suing Meta and the company OpenAI in San Francisco.
They accuse the companies of using their copyrighted material to train chatbots and lawyers say it could be a landmark case.
It’s systems like ChatGPT, which uses artificial intelligence to consume troves of content so computers can respond to questions in a humanlike manner.
For example – you can ask it to write you an essay on why the Bay Area is so great – and it will in a matter of seconds.
“Any decision on generative AI is likely to be precedential,” said Tyler Ochoa, law professor at Santa Clara University.
He specializes in copyright cases and said this proposed class action lawsuit makes a reasonable argument, but thinks the court would likely favor Meta and OpenAI who could argue it’s fair use.
“The question is whether copying for purposes of training data is a fair use. Then there’s the question of the outputs. Whether what it generates is too similar to a copyrighted work that is one of the ones it ingested,” said Ochoa.
He added that it’s similar to a previous case regarding Google Books.
“They scanned 20 million books from a bunch of libraries to create a product that enabled full text search of those libraries. Nonetheless, the court said it was a fair use so long as you didn’t display those books in a way that could substitute for purchasing them,” said Ochoa.
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly Chicago Catch-Up newsletter.
The attorneys for Silverman say this isn’t fair use, and said they want to make sure the artists and authors who generate the works are treated fairly.
They say just because the tech is new or emerging, doesn’t mean they get to steal protected content and trample on copyright laws.
Meta said it has no comment and NBC Bay Area did not hear back from OpenAi.
The attorneys also filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI two weeks ago on behalf of authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad.
