Comedian Sarah Silverman Sues Meta & OpenAI For Copyright Infringement

Comedian Sarah Silverman isn’t in a laughing mood these days as she and two others have sued Meta and OpenAI for using their original content without their permission.

Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden filed a lawsuit in California against Facebook’s parent company and ChatGPT for allegedly using their content to train their artificial intelligence programs.

The lawsuits allege that most of the material used in their training comes from copyrighted works used “without consent, without credit and without compensation.”

The catalyst for their lawsuit is reportedly leaked information about how the two companies operated their artificial intelligence department. The three authors then found that their books were included in the materials used to hone AI capabilities in conversing with a more human tone.

The books in question were specified in the lawsuits as Silverman’s The Bedwetter, Kadrey’s Sandman Slim and Golden’s Ararat.

OpenAI states in the documents that books are crucial to the training ground of artificial intelligence because it “contains long stretches of contiguous text, which allows the generative model to learn to condition on long-range information.”

Both Meta and OpenAI have reportedly used online book datasets such as Project Gutenberg, which boasts over 70,000 downloadable ebooks on their website.

The same law firm, Joseph Saveri Law Firm, representing Silverman, Kadrey and Golden also represents authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad against OpenAI. Tremblay’s and Awad’s lawsuit was filed a week before the other two cases.

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In addition to using materials without consent, Silverman’s lawsuit also accuses OpenAI and Meta of profiting “unfairly” and “tak[ing] credit for developing a commercial product based on unattributed reproductions of… stolen writing and ideas. ”

The lawsuit calls for an undetermined award of damages, as they have been “injured by direct copyright infringement.” Therefore, they are entitled to “statutory damages, actual damages and restitution of profits.”