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Comedian Sarah Silverman opened up about her copyright infringement lawsuit against Sam Altman's OpenAI, which owns the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.
Silverman appeared on the latest episode of the SiriusXM podcast, "Literally! With Rob Lowe," on Thursday. During the interview, Silverman discussed her ongoing legal dispute with OpenAI that began in 2023.
Silverman, who authored "The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee," is among over a dozen authors who said the company used their books to train ChatGPT. Authors Ta-Nehisi Coates, Laura Lippman, and Paul Tremblay are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which was filed in the US District Court, Northern District of California San Francisco Division.
"Much of the material in OpenAI's training datasets, however, comes from copyrighted works — including books written by Plaintiffs — that were copied by OpenAI without consent, without credit, and without compensation," the complaint says.
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During her interview, Silverman said artificial intelligence "is the future."
"It's gonna happen with or without us. It's gonna do hopefully wonderful things and things in medicine and things that, where it does jobs nobody wants or whatever that people — but they educate the AI," she said. "It wasn't born knowing everything. They have to educate. They load information onto it. And so they used many, many, many, many beyond, many, books that are copyrighted and that people wrote."
Silverman said OpenAI "stole" those books to educate its system.
"They used our books without our knowledge, without our consent, without any compensation," she said. "You know, even if it was the price of the book, but you can't do that. It's not legal to do that."
However, Silverman told Lowe that the legal proceedings against OpenAI will be difficult.
"They are the richest entities in the world, and we live in a country where that's considered a person that can influence, practically create policy, let alone influence it. So yeah, it's gonna be tough," she said.
OpenAI said in October that it is valued at $157 billion. The lawsuit's defendants include OpenAI, L.P. and OpenAI GP, L.L.C, among other entities.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are seeking injunctive relief and damages.
Representatives for Silverman and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The plaintiffs originally sued OpenAI for direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, violating The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unjust enrichment, violating the California and common law unfair competition laws, and negligence.
However, in a court document submitted in February, a judge made a decision regarding OpenAI's request to dismiss all of the plaintiff's claims except direct copyright infringement. The judge dismissed all the claims except direct copyright infringement and unfair competition, prompting the plaintiffs to file an amended lawsuit in March.
OpenAI responded to the amended complaint in August, writing in a court filing that it denied all allegations. The company included quotes from its OpenAI's GPT-4o in the court document opposing the plaintiff's claims.
"This response is not reproduced from any preexisting source; instead, it is the model's unique synthesis of the language and facts that it has learned," OpenAI said in the filing.
