Why Is Sarah Silverman Suing OpenAI And Meta?

Sarah Silverman has joined the ranks of authors and artists alleging that AI training with their work is copyright infringement. Generative AI makers like OpenAI disagree, claiming fair use. Is AI training fair use, or are these companies liable for infringement? This is an open question for the courts but this post outlines the creatives' claims and defenses to them.

WHAT ARE THE LAWSUITS ABOUT?

Comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors claim that ChatGPT and LLaMA (Meta's AI generator) were "trained" on their copyrighted books without consent or compensation. Generative AI models like ChatGPT known as Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed to mimic sets of data that they are fed. LLMs produce full sentences and paragraphs that are similar to human language because they are trained to continuously adjust their outputs to resemble sequences of words copied from a training dataset. Silverman's complaint alleges that LLMs are committing infringement by