Authors Richard Kadrey, Christopher Golden, and comedian Sarah Silverman are suing OpenAI and Meta in a US district court on separate counts of copyright infringement.
The lawsuits claim, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on datasets containing their works that were obtained illegally.
They claim these datasets were obtained from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting that the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”
The trio submits evidence in the OpenAI lawsuit that ChatGPT will sum up their books upon request, violating their copyrights.
The first book displayed in the exhibits being summarised by ChatGPT is Silverman’s Bedwetter. Golden’s book Ararat and Kadrey’s book Sandman Slim are also used as examples. In the complaint, it is claimed that the chatbot never bothered to “reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works.”
Regarding the related action against Meta, it asserts that datasets Meta used to train its LLaMA models—a quartet of open-source AI Models the business unveiled in February—contained access to the authors’ works.
The authors contend that they “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material” for the businesses’ AI models in both claims.
Six charges of various copyright breaches, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition are included in each of their complaints. The authors are requesting statutory damages, the return of their profits, and other things.
