Comedian and author Sarah Silverman is one of the three lead plaintiffs filing class-action lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta each over dual claims of copyright infringement. Alongside Silverman are authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, who all allege that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's LLaMA illegally obtained text from their literary works — namely Silverman's 2010 bestselling memoir "The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee," Golden's book "Ararat" and Kadrey's book "Sandman Slim" — using "shadow library" websites (like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and more) without the consent of — or compensation to — the authors.
In the OpenAI suit, the trio allege that when ChatGPT "was prompted to summarize books written by each of the Plaintiffs, it generated very accurate summaries . . . which means that ChatGPT retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset and is able to output similar textual content. At no point did ChatGPT reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works," per Variety. And in the Meta suit, the plaintiffs allege that their books were accessible in illegally acquired datasets Meta used to train its LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) language models. The suits — filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division — seek class-action status and unspecified monetary damages.
The lawyers representing Silverman, Golden and Kadrey filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI last month for authors Paul Tremblay ("The Cabin at the End of the World") and Mona Awad ("Bunny" and "13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl"). Both Awad and Tremblay claimed their books, which are copyrighted, were unlawfully "ingested" and "used to train" ChatGPT because the chatbot generated "very accurate summaries" of the novels, per the complaint obtained by The Guardian.
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