The actor and comedian Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta, claiming the companies used her book without permission to train AI programs, Variety reports.
In the lawsuit, Silverman says that the artificial intelligence company and the technology corporation used her book The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee to train their large language models—algorithms that can generate content.
Two other authors are plaintiffs in the suit: Richard Kadrey (The Wrong Dead Guy, The Grand Dark) and Christopher Golden (Snowblind, All Hallows).
In the suit against Meta, attorneys Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick claim that the authors’ “copyrighted materials were copied and ingested as part of training LLaMA,” Meta’s large language model. The lawyers made similar claims against OpenAI over its ChatGPT bot, writing, “ChatGPT generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works—something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”
The claims for relief in the suits include direct and vicarious copyright infringement, unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment. The plaintiffs are asking that the suits proceed as class actions and are seeking injunctive relief and monetary damages.
The lawsuits are similar to one filed earlier this month by authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay against OpenAI. Saveri and Butterick are also representing those novelists in their suit.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
