Comedian Sarah Silverman sues OpenAI, Meta for copyright infringement, claiming her book was used as AI training material

On Friday, stand-up comedian and writer Sarah Silverman filed two separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta over alleged copyright infringement, the New York Post reported.

The complaints claimed that the companies used Silverman's book, "The Bedwetter," for training AI programs without her consent. Writers Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey also joined Silverman in the lawsuits.

OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's LLaMA allegedly trained their large language models by obtaining massive amounts of text from "shadow library" websites, including Library Genesis, Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Bibliotik, according to the complaints. A significant amount of the material on these websites is illegally uploaded.

"The books aggregated by these websites have also been available in bulk via torrent systems. These flagrantly illegal shadow libraries have long been of interest to the AI-training community," the lawsuit against OpenAI stated.

When prompted, ChatGPT is able to summarize the authors' books, which is "only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs' copyrighted works," according to the complaint.

The lawsuit claimed that the AI programs are able to generate "very accurate summaries" of the books but failed to "reproduce any of the copyright management information."

"The summaries get some details wrong," the suit stated. "This is expected, since a large language model mixes together expressive material derived from many sources. Still, the rest of the summaries are accurate, which means that ChatGPT retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset and is able to output similar textual content."

The authors' lawsuit against Meta claimed that LLaMA was trained using a dataset called "The Pile," created by the AI research organization EleutherAI. A paper published by the group stated that the dataset was "derived from a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker," a shadow library.

"These shadow libraries have long been of interest to the AI-training community because of the large quantity of copyrighted material they host. For that reason, these shadow libraries are also flagrantly illegal."

Meta and OpenAI were accused of violating six counts of copyright laws for failing to obtain consent to use the books as training material for their AI systems," the lawsuit stated.

Silverman, Golden, and Kadrey are seeking "statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, and other remedies provided by law."

The authors' legal counsel, OpenAI, and Meta did not respond to a request for comment, the Post reported.

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