Elena Lacey

Illustration by Burton Booz for The Washington Post

Technology

The Washington Post

0405-TF-TechHype

BRITAIN-ROYALS-KATE-HEALTH

Contributor

0221-helpdesk-AIPHONES

FRANCE-TECHNOLOGY-OPENAI

AIMIRROR

DO NOT USE FOR HP OR SOCIAL USE ONLY WITH AIDATA-VIZ

AI can now create images out of thin air. See how it works.

US President Joe Biden Artificial Intelligence

ILLUSTRATION

Capitol Hill

Duolingo App Ahead Of Earnings Figures

0109-TF-ReviewsAI

Tribune New Bidders Emerge

STOCK IMAGE

Maryland Principal Impersonation

Inflatable tube men with the text "buy our A.I."

biz-AIMONEY

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Apple banned this app for years. It’s now America’s No. 1 iPhone app. 

A TikTok ban could also end short-form video as we’ve come to know it

An AI blood test purports to diagnose postpartum depression

Nationals sweep away the Marlins to get back to .500

Blinken calls proposed Israeli cease-fire deal ‘extraordinarily generous’

Jayden Daniels is latest in Washington’s checkered history of first-round QBs

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Soldiers reunite with their pets from overseas: ‘It meant everything to me’

The Rick Steves guide to life

The sad, stale state of in-flight vegetarian meals

How to train for a marathon on vacation

Carolyn Hax: Her family left all the kitchen work to her, so she went on strike

Miss Manners: Some audience members ask rambling questions post-lecture

Ask Amy: Why did my friend lie about seeing my ex-girlfriend?

King Charles is back at work after cancer diagnosis. He looks good.

In a ‘meat grinder’ of a war, Russian and Ukrainian casualties rise

Middle East conflict live updates: Netanyahu vows to invade Rafah regardless of cease-fire deal; Blinken in region

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

Humans might need to re-engineer the climate

Mike Johnson works to boost House GOP funding as ouster threat looms

Election 2024 latest news: Biden heading to Delaware for campaign event; Trump trial resumes

Bill Barr doesn’t mind a little autocracy if your politics are right

In photos: Flash floods kill over 100 people in Kenya

Americans are sleeping more than ever. See how you compare.

Parenting in Gaza today is so much more than keeping your children alive

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Facts in the Trump courtroom v. ‘facts’ in the court of public opinion

Trump trial live updates: Witness testimony continues with Keith Davidson

Trump Hush Money

Big Tech news and how to take control of your data and devices

See more coverage in your recommendations

Tips delivered to your inbox twice weekly

The Tech Friend newsletter

Business and Tech alerts

Tomohiro Ohsumi

SAN FRANCISCO — A California-based law firm is launching a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the artificial-intelligence company that created popular chatbot ChatGPT massively violated the<b> </b>copyrights and privacy of countless people when it used data <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/05/ai-spam-websites-books-chatgpt/" target=_blank>scraped from the internet</a> to train its tech.

The lawsuit seeks to test out a novel legal theory — that OpenAI violated the rights of millions of internet users when it used their social media comments, blog posts, Wikipedia articles and family recipes. Clarkson, the law firm behind the suit, has previously brought large-scale class-action lawsuits on issues ranging from data breaches to false advertising.

The firm wants to represent “real people whose information was stolen and commercially misappropriated to create this very powerful technology,” said Ryan Clarkson, the firm’s managing partner.

The case was filed in federal court in the northern district of California Wednesday morning. A spokesman for OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit goes to the heart of a major unresolved question hanging over the surge in “generative” AI tools such as chatbots and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/30/midjourney-ai-image-generation-rules/" target=_blank>image generators</a>. The technology works by ingesting billions of words from the open internet and learning to build inferences between them. After consuming enough data, the resulting “large language models” can predict what to say in response to a prompt, giving them the ability to write poetry, have complex conversations and pass professional exams. But the humans who wrote those billions of words never signed off on having a company such as OpenAI use them for its own profit.

Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart

“All of that information is being taken at scale when it was never intended to be utilized by a large language model,” Clarkson said. He said he hopes to get a court to institute some guardrails on how AI algorithms are trained and how people are compensated when their data is used.

The firm already has a group of plaintiffs and is actively looking for more.

The legality of using data pulled from the public internet to train tools that could prove highly lucrative to their developers is still unclear. Some AI developers have argued that the use of data from the internet should be considered “fair use,” a concept in copyright law that creates an exception if the material is changed in a “transformative” way.

The question of fair use is “an open issue that we will be seeing play out in the courts in the months and years to come,” said Katherine Gardner, an intellectual-property lawyer at Gunderson Dettmer, a firm that mostly represents tech start-ups. Artists and other creative professionals who can show their copyrighted work was used to train the AI models could have an argument against the companies using it, but it’s less likely that people who simply posted or commented on a website would be able to win damages, she said.

“When you put content on a social media site or any site, you’re generally granting a very broad license to the site to be able to use your content in any way,” Gardner said. “It’s going to be very difficult for the ordinary end user to claim that they are entitled to any sort of payment or compensation for use of their data as part of the training.”

The suit also adds to the growing list of legal challenges to the companies building and hoping to profit from AI tech. A class-action lawsuit was filed in November against OpenAI and Microsoft for how the companies used computer code in the Microsoft-owned online <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/04/why-microsoft-is-buying-github-in-7-5-billion-deal/" target="_blank">coding platform GitHub</a> to train AI tools. In February, Getty Images sued Stability AI, a smaller AI start-up, alleging it illegally used its photos to train its image-generating bot. And this month OpenAI was sued for defamation by a radio host in Georgia who said ChatGPT produced text that wrongfully accused him of fraud.

OpenAI isn’t the only company using troves of data scraped from the open internet to train their AI models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and a growing number of other companies are all doing the same thing.<b> </b>But Clarkson decided to go after OpenAI because of its role in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/27/chatgpt-google-meta/" target=_blank>spurring its bigger rivals</a> to push out their own AI when it captured the public’s imagination with ChatGPT last year, Clarkson said.

“They’re the company that ignited this AI arms race,” he said. “They’re the natural first target.”

OpenAI doesn’t share what kind of data went into its latest model, GPT4, but previous versions of the tech have been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/" target=_blank>shown to have digested</a> Wikipedia pages, news articles and social media comments. Chatbots from Google and other companies have used similar data sets.

Regulators are discussing enacting new laws that require more transparency from companies about what data went into their AI. It’s also possible that a court case could prompt a judge to force a company such as OpenAI to turn over information on what data it used, said Gardner, the intellectual-property lawyer.

Some companies have tried to stop AI firms from scraping their data. In April, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/06/16/grammy-ai-rules/" target=_blank>music distributor</a> Universal Music Group asked Apple and Spotify to block scrapers, according to the Financial Times. Social media site Reddit is shutting off access to its data stream, citing how Big Tech companies have for years scraped the comments and conversations on its site. Twitter owner Elon Musk <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1648784955655192577?s=20" target=_blank>threatened to sue</a> Microsoft for using Twitter data it had gotten from the company to train its AI. Musk is building <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/21/elon-musk-ai-startup/" target=_blank>his own AI company</a>.

The new class-action lawsuit against OpenAI goes further in its allegations, arguing that the company isn’t transparent enough with people who sign up to use its tools that the data they put into the model may be used to train new products that the company will make money from, such as its Plugins tool. It also alleges OpenAI doesn’t do enough to make sure children under 13 aren’t using its tools, something that other tech companies including Facebook and YouTube have been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/30/facebook-instagram-teens-health/" target=_blank>accused of over the years</a>.

Carleton University, BA in Journalism and Global Politics

Gerrit De Vynck is a tech reporter for The Washington Post. He writes about Google, artificial intelligence and the algorithms that increasingly shape society. He previously covered tech for seven years at Bloomberg News.

Gerrit De Vynck

washpost

ChatGPT maker OpenAI faces class action lawsuit over data to train AI

the-washington-post

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman Speaks In Tokyo

Stringer

Getty Images

Help Desk

Artificial Intelligence

Internet Culture

Space

Tech Policy

Tech

prism://prism.query/two-sites,/technology,/politics/powerpost/the-technology-202?limit=20

ChatGPT maker OpenAI faces a lawsuit over how it used people’s data

A California law firm says the company’s use of scraped data from the web violates the rights of millions of internet users