OpenAI faces a class action lawsuit from a California-based law firm, alleging its use of scraped data from the web violates the rights of millions of internet users.

The story was reported a short time ago by The Washington Post (ChatGPT maker OpenAI faces class action over how it used people’s data, written by Gerrit De Vynck and available here).

The lawsuit seeks to test out a novel legal theory — that the creator of ChatGPT 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 this morning.

The lawsuit goes to the heart of a major unresolved question hanging over the surge in “generative” AI tools such as chatbots and image generators. 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.

“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 planning to recruit more once the lawsuit has been launched.

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 coding platform GitHub 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.

Much more in the article via the link above.

It’s not a surprise to me that OpenAI faces a class action lawsuit over the use of people’s data – the only surprise is that it took this long. It would be an interesting test to find content from a thought leader in eDiscovery (or any industry, for that matter) and ask questions about the topic to see if ChatGPT regurgitates exactly the same content. Sounds like a fun experiment for me to try – will report back on that if I do.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that OpenAI faces a class action lawsuit over the use of people’s data? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image Lawsuit by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

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