Comedian Sarah Silverman slapped Mark Zuckerberg with a potentially game-changing lawsuit
Comedy has become a flashpoint in the culture war.
Comedians have been at the forefront of the latest fight for free speech.
Now comedian Sarah Silverman has slapped Mark Zuckerberg with a potentially game-changing lawsuit Sarah Silverman has been one of several comics who built a reputation on being foul-mouthed and irreverent, then pivoted to becoming “woke” in the Donald Trump era.
“Woke” comedy has been on the decline while comedians who solely focus on being funny have remained successful.But the next fight in the world of comedy could be over an entirely different issue.
Silverman is taking umbrage with the new artificial intelligence products ChatGPT and LLaMA. ChatGPT (produced by OpenAI) and LLaMA (produced by Meta) are essentially high-level chatbots that can handle broad questions and give detailed answers, unlike rudimentary tech support chatbots.
Silverman is suing the companies on copyright infringement grounds.Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey claim that their books were used by the AI platforms without consent.
Artificial intelligence presents new questions about legal protections and compensation
Gizmodo reported that “Silverman, Golden, and Kadrey argue in the respective complaints… that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on copyrighted material, which includes published literary works from the trio… [T]he authors allege that some of the training data come from a shadow library of sources like Library Genesis, Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Bibliotik, which are internet-based torrent repositories that include copyrighted books.”In Silverman’s complaint, ChatGPT and LLaMA reportedly recited passages from her book “The Bedwetter” verbatim.
Both OpenAI and LLaMA claim that they do not feed copyrighted material to their AI products, which raises a thorny legal question.
Currently, the large language model (LLM) AIs cannot think for themselves; they essentially aggregate based on available information.
That means that they are inherently taking from other people’s works without compensation or attribution.Many have raised ethical concerns about AI—Elon Musk believes unfettered AI is more dangerous than nukes—but the issue of copyright infringement has not been front and center.
Copyright lawsuits could put Big Tech in check
The website LLMlitigation.com is tracking the progress of lawsuits regarding LLM copyright violations.
If the suits are successful, that would put a huge pause on the technology until the legal entanglements can get sorted out.
Nevertheless, the technology cannot be uninvented, so ethical questions about AI will have to be adjudicated in the court of public opinion as well.
Stay tuned to Unmuzzled News for any updates to this ongoing story.
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