An increasing number of artists, writers, and filmmakers are raising legal challenges against artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and Bard, alleging that these tools have been trained on their copyrighted work without permission or compensation. This poses a significant legal threat to the companies behind these technologies, which are being widely adopted worldwide.
OpenAI's ChatGPT, image-generator Dall-E, Google's Bard, and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion have all been trained on a vast amount of copyrighted content, including news articles, books, images, videos, and blog posts scraped from the internet.
Recently, comedian Sarah Silverman filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Facebook's Meta, claiming that her book was used without permission in training data as the chatbots accurately summarized its content. Novelists Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay have also filed similar lawsuits against OpenAI. Additionally, over 5,000 authors, including Jodi Picoult, Margaret Atwood, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, have signed a petition demanding tech companies to obtain consent, provide credit, and offer compensation to writers whose works were used in training data.
Class-action lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI and Google, accusing them of violating the rights of millions of internet users by utilizing their social media comments for training conversational AI. Furthermore, the Federal Trade Commission has initiated an investigation into OpenAI's data practices, examining potential violations of consumer rights.
Meanwhile, Congress held hearings focusing on AI and copyright, featuring representatives from the music industry, Adobe, Stability AI, and concept artist Karla Ortiz. Ortiz emphasized that AI companies employ the work of artists as training data without consent, credit, or compensation, highlighting the unique reliance of these technologies on the creations of others.
The surge in lawsuits, high-profile complaints, and proposed regulations may present a significant obstacle to the widespread adoption of "generative" AI tools. These tools have gained immense popularity since OpenAI's public release of ChatGPT, leading executives from major tech companies to hail them as the most groundbreaking innovation since the advent of the mobile phone.
Artists argue that the livelihoods of millions of creative workers are at stake, particularly as AI tools are starting to replace human-made work. The widespread scraping of art, writing, and movies from the web for AI training has occurred without the consent or consideration of creators.
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