Sarah Silverman and novelists sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for ingesting their books

abcnews.go.com:

Ask ChatGPT about comedian Sarah Silverman’s memoir “The Bedwetter” and the artificial intelligence chatbot can come up with a detailed synopsis of every part of the book

Ask ChatGPT about comedian Sarah Silverman's memoir “The Bedwetter” and the artificial intelligence chatbot can come up with a detailed synopsis of every part of the book.

Does that mean it effectively “read” and memorized a pirated copy? Or it scraped so many customer reviews and online chatter about the bestseller or the musical it inspired that it passes for an expert?

The U.S. courts may now help sort that out after Silverman sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for copyright infringement this week, joining a growing number of writers who say they unwittingly built the foundation for Silicon Valley's red-hot AI boom.

Silverman's lawsuit says she never gave permission for OpenAI to ingest the digital version of her 2010 book to train its AI models, and it was likely stolen from a “shadow library” of pirated works. It says the memoir was copied “without consent, without credit, and without compensation."

It's one of a mounting number of cases that could crack open the secrecy of OpenAI and its rivals about the valuable data used to train increasingly widely used “generative AI” products that create new text, images and music. And it raises questions about the ethical and legal bedrock of tools that the McKinsey Global Institute projects will add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy.

“This is an open, dirty secret of the whole machine learning industry,” said Matthew Butterick, one of the lawyers representing Silverman and other authors in seeking a class-action case. “They love book data and they get it from these illicit