Comedian Sarah Silverman, Others Sue ChatGPT and Meta For Copyright Infringement

Sarah Silverman has filed a separate lawsuit against Meta and OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT.

The Emmy-winning performer has joined the growing list of content creators who are filing lawsuits regarding large language models (LLMs), the foundational technology behind emerging AI apps like ChatGPT. LLMs acquire their capabilities by “training” on extensive collections of written and other content.

According to Silverman’s legal team, the practice of training AI by utilizing others’ intellectual property, including copyrighted content such as books, is deemed as “grift.” Silverman also alleges that OpenAI unlawfully replicated her work “without consent, without credit, and without compensation.”

Additionally, the exhibits presented in the case showed ChatGPT being ordered to provide summaries of Silverman’s memoir and the works of other authors. The generated summaries include both accurate renditions and verbatim excerpts from the original works. However, they lack the customary copyright information typically found in these books.

Earlier this year, attorneys Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick sued Stability AI on behalf of visual artists. The artists claimed that the “parasite” app wrongfully exploited their work. Moreover, the duo filed a lawsuit last year against GitHub. They stated that the platform’s AI-assisted coding tool was developed using stolen code from other programmers.