Sarah Silverman, along with two other authors, has filed lawsuits against tech companies Meta and OpenAI for allegedly using their copyrighted works to train their artificial intelligence (AI) systems without permission or compensation. The books mentioned in the lawsuits include Silverman’s best-selling memoir “The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee” from 2010. The lawsuits were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The lawsuits seek class-action status and unspecified monetary damages. In addition to Silverman, the other authors named as plaintiffs are novelist Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Last month, lawyers Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad.
OpenAI, founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and CEO Sam Altman, released its ChatGPT AI model in November 2022. While the company has not disclosed the specifics of its datasets used for ChatGPT, the lawsuit alleges that the data includes copyrighted works from the plaintiffs. The complaint also claims that ChatGPT has the ability to generate accurate summaries of the plaintiffs’ books, indicating that it retains knowledge of their works.
In the case against Meta, the plaintiffs’ lawyers accuse the company of copying a large dataset of books, which includes the works of the three authors, to train their language models called LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI).
Representatives for Meta and OpenAI have not responded to requests for comment on the lawsuits.
Sarah Silverman is a renowned comedian, actor, writer, and producer. She has won two Emmy Awards and her off-Broadway musical adaptation of “The Bedwetter” had a successful run in spring 2022. She currently hosts “The Sarah Silverman Podcast” and will soon host “Stupid Pet Tricks” on TBS, inspired by the famous segment from David Letterman’s late-night show.