OpenAI and Microsoft accused of stealing data to train ChatGPT in new class action suit

cointelegraph.com:

OpenAI and Microsoft have been named as the defendants in yet another class action lawsuit over their alleged use of web scraping techniques to obtain supposedly private data for the use of training ChatGPT and other associated artificial intelligence models. 

The most recent class action suit was filed on Sep. 5 in San Francisco by a law firm representing a pair of unnamed engineers.

According to a filing registered with the United States District Court, Northern District California:

The lawsuit goes on to complain that OpenAI “doubled down on a strategy to secretly harvest massive amounts of personal data from the internet” after restructuring in 2019.

“Without this unprecedented theft of private and copyrighted information belonging to real people” write the plaintiffs, “the products,” referring to ChatGPT, DALL-E and OpenAI’s other models, “would not be the multi-billion-dollar business they are today.”

According to the filing, the plaintiffs are asking the courts to award damages to the plaintiffs and any members of the proposed classes — which could conceivably include anyone whose information was allegedly scraped.

The suit also asks the courts to order the defendants to conduct “nonrestituionary disgorgement” of profits made as a result to the alleged illegal scraping of data.

Scraping is the practice of using an automated bot, often called a "crawler," to collect data from the internet. This most recent suit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft knowingly engaged in “illegal” scraping activity.

A previous class action lawsuit making nearly identical claims against OpenAI and Microsoft was filed in the same court district on June 28. It’s unclear at this time if the court or defendants in the separate cases would