#salamigrift — Public Fediverse posts

.> Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement...

.> Silverman, an Emmy-winning performer and former cast member on "Saturday Night Live," is the latest content creator to file a lawsuit over so-called large language models (LLM), which underpin burgeoning "generative" AI apps such as ChatGPT. LLMs develop their functionality by "training" on vast amounts of written and other content, including material created by professional and amateur writers.

.> Silverman's lawyers say training AI by having it process others' intellectual property, including copyrighted material like books, amounts to "grift."

.> ... Silverman accused OpenAI — which created ChatGPT — and Facebook owner Meta of copying her work "without consent, without credit and without compensation." The plaintiffs are seeking injunctions to stop OpenAI and Meta from using the authors' works, as well as monetary damages.

.> ... It produces accurate summaries as well as passages lifted verbatim from the works, but doesn't include the copyright information that is customarily printed in these and other books — evidence that it was fed a complete copy of the work, according to the complaint.

.> OpenAI and Meta both trained their respective LLMs in part on "shadow libraries" — repositories of vast amounts of pirated books that are "flagrantly illegal," according to the plaintiffs' lawyers. Books provide a particularly valuable training material for generative AI tools because they "offer the best examples of high-quality longform writing," according to the complaint, citing internal research from #OpenAI.