Microsoft, OpenAI sued for $3B after allegedly trampling privacy with ChatGPT

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https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/microsoft_openai_sued_privacy/

Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies’ AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent.

The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Francisco, California, alleges the two businesses ignored the legal means of obtaining data for their AI models and chose to gather it without paying for it.

“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” the complaint says. “They systematically scraped 300 billion words from the internet, ‘books, articles, websites and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.’ OpenAI did so in secret, and without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law.”.

Through their AI products, its claimed, the two companies “collect, store, track, share, and disclose” the personal information of millions of people, including product details, account information, names, contact details, login credentials, emails, payment information, transaction records, browser data, social media information, chat logs, usage data, analytics, cookies, searches, and other online activity…

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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The 157 page complaint is heavy on media and academic citations expressing alarm about AI models and ethics but light on specific instances of harm.

For the 16 plaintiffs, the complaint indicates that they used ChatGPT, as well as other internet services like Reddit, and expected that their digital interactions would not be incorporated into an AI model.

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Authors sue OpenAI, allege their books were used to train ChatGPT without their consent

Two authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that their copyrighted books were used to train ChatGPT without their consent.

Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad claim that ChatGPT generates “very accurate summaries” of their works, according to the complaint.

They allege the summaries are “only possible” if ChatGPT was trained on their books, which would be a violation of copyright law.

Two authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last week alleging that their copyrighted books were used to train the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, without their consent.

Paul Tremblay, author of “The Cabin at the End of the World,” and Mona Awad, author of “Bunny” and “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” said ChatGPT generates “very accurate summaries” of their works, according to the complaint. They allege the summaries are “only possible” if ChatGPT was trained on their books, which would be a violation of copyright law.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Lawyers for Tremblay and Awad did not immediately respond…

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Difficult to summarize a book without reading it. Shouldn’t the summary lead to extra sales (as no opinion of value is included)? Will they sue book reviewers too (even those who gave a positive critique)?

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b wrote:

Will they sue book reviewers too (even those who gave a positive critique)?

Will they sue book reviewers who gave negative critique ?

Authors agree to book reviews, they don’t agree to chatGPT scraping.

* Court should order all AI software (chatGPT, Bard, CoPilot..) to completely wipe all data accumulated (done by external security company) and start fresh with no privacy, copyrighted…data scraping..)

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Alex5723 wrote:

Will they sue book reviewers who gave negative critique?

They could try, but most would fail (depending on country).

Alex5723 wrote:

Authors agree to book reviews,

How?

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b wrote:

How?

Publishers, authors send books to professional reviewers who get paid for writing.
chatGPT get paid for using the tool for scraping data without peoples consent.

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James Patterson, Margaret Atwood, and 8,000 other authors want AI companies to pay them for using their works

Over 8,000 authors signed a letter saying the AI industry uses their work without permission.

They’re telling companies to “mitigate the damage” to their profession caused by generative AI.

There has been deepening criticism of AI companies from across the media and entertainment industries.

Over 8,000 authors — including Margaret Atwood and James Patterson — have signed an open letter demanding compensation from AI companies for using their works to train AI without permission…

The letter is addressed to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella…

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157 pages, 15 counts. Nice work! Ought to be resolved by at least 2040….<sigh>

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Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out

The tech company’s latest proposal about generative AI turns copyright law on its head, and could especially hurt smaller content creators, say experts

Publishers should be able to opt out of having their works mined by generative artificial intelligence systems, according to Google, but the company has not said how such a system would work.

In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.

The company has called for Australian policymakers to promote “copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems”…

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Alex5723 wrote:

The company has called for Australian policymakers to promote “copyright systems that enable appropriate and fair use of copyrighted content to enable the training of AI models in Australia on a broad and diverse range of data, while supporting workable opt-outs for entities that prefer their data not to be trained in using AI systems”…

… used in training, Shirley? 😲

(But, OK, it’s the Grauniad!)

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New from OpenAI : GPTBot

..Usage

Web pages crawled with the GPTBot user agent may potentially be used to improve future models and are filtered to remove sources that require paywall access, are known to gather personally identifiable information (PII), or have text that violates our policies. Allowing GPTBot to access your site can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety. Below, we also share how to disallow GPTBot from accessing your site.

Disallowing GPTBot

To disallow GPTBot to access your site you can add the GPTBot to your site’s robots.txt:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

OpenAI’s web scraping GPTBot is under attack – here’s why

There is already a ton of controversy surrounding AI, especially with the use of ChatGPT in papers, articles, and elsewhere. However, OpenAI (the company that developed the ChatGPT chatbot) is kicking up even more controversy with a new GPTBot that scrapes the internet, learning from the content published on the world wide web…

The Verge scrambling to block the bot from scraping their content? Well, much of it comes down to the age-old consent variable. A lot of the content being shared on websites, especially blogs and things of that nature, is original content in some way…

The other big problem is privacy. Because this bot is scraping the internet, it’s also scraping up information like usernames, emails, and other information that may have been shared in public places. That means that information could inadvertently be included somewhere it shouldn’t be..

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oldfry

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Report: Potential NYT lawsuit could force OpenAI to wipe ChatGPT and start over

OpenAI could be fined up to $150,000 for each piece of infringing content

Weeks after The New York Times updated its terms of service (TOS) to prohibit AI companies from scraping its articles and images to train AI models, it appears that the Times may be preparing to sue OpenAI. The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT’s dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.

NPR spoke to two people “with direct knowledge” who confirmed that the Times’ lawyers were mulling whether a lawsuit might be necessary “to protect the intellectual property rights” of the Times’ reporting….

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AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge

DC District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell says human beings are an “essential part of a valid copyright claim.”

United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created.

Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” which would have listed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the artwork’s owner, but he was repeatedly rejected…

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SueW

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John Grisham, other top US authors sue OpenAI over copyrights

A trade group for U.S. authors has sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on behalf of prominent writers including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R.R. Martin, accusing the company of unlawfully training its popular artificial-intelligence based chatbot ChatGPT on their work.

The proposed class-action lawsuit filed late on Tuesday by the Authors Guild joins several others from writers, source-code owners and visual artists against generative AI providers. In addition to Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI, similar lawsuits are pending against Meta Platforms and Stability AI over the data used to train their AI systems.

Other authors involved in the latest lawsuit include “The Lincoln Lawyer” writer Michael Connelly and lawyer-novelists David Baldacci and Scott Turow…

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