⚖️ The lawsuits against OpenAI keep piling up
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⚖️ The lawsuits & investigations against OpenAI keep piling up
The lawsuits and investigations against OpenAI keep coming in, and now there are three main fronts: privacy, copyright, and Elon Musk. Here are some updates on each of these fronts:
a. Privacy
→ The authors of one of the privacy lawsuits against OpenAI answer its request to dismiss the case. There are some compelling arguments here, such as:
“OpenAI chastises Plaintiffs, their counsel, and by extension all the concerned everyday citizens featured in the Complaint, for being too alarmist. OpenAI’s leaders, however, have raised the exact same concerns, repeatedly. But for purposes of litigation, the story is apparently different. It’s all so disingenuous. And it’s also not the only sign OpenAI cares nothing about the individual victims of its theft, fraud, and privacy invasions. If it did, OpenAI would be seeking to right the wrong by offering compensation, as it is now doing on its nationwide post-theft tour across the boardrooms of other large and powerful companies, agreeing to pay millions of dollars for content the law required it to license in the first place.”
→ The Italian Data Protection Authority has opened an investigation into OpenAI’s Sora (their text-to-video AI tool). First, OpenAI will have to clarify to the Italian DPA if Sora is already available to the public and if it is or will be offered to users in the EU/Italy. Then, OpenAI will have to clarify: "how the algorithm is trained; what data is collected and processed to train the algorithm, especially whether it is personal data; whether particular categories of data (religious or philosophical beliefs, political opinions, genetic data, health, sexual life) are collected; which sources are used."
b. Copyright
→ There is a new copyright lawsuit filed against OpenAI requiring that they "remove all copies of the copyrighted works from which author, title, copyright, and terms of use information was removed from their training sets." The authors of this lawsuit claim that:
"The OpenAI Defendants created tools in late 2023 to allow copyright owners to block their work from being incorporated into training sets. This further corroborates that the OpenAI Defendants had reason to know that use of copyrighted material in their training sets is copyright infringement, which is enabled, facilitated, and concealed by the OpenAI Defendants' removal of author, title, copyright, and terms of use information from their training sets."
c. Elon Musk
Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, its CEO, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman. The lawsuit can be found here. Among Musk's legal requests are:
“A. An order requiring that Defendants continue to follow OpenAI’s longstanding practice of making AI research and technology developed at OpenAI available to the public; (…)
B. (…) a judicial determination that GPT-4 constitutes Artificial General Intelligence and is thereby outside the scope of OpenAI’s license to Microsoft;
C. (…) a judicial determination that Q* and/or other OpenAI next-generation large language models in development constitute(s) Artificial General Intelligence and/are outside the scope of OpenAI’s license to Microsoft (…)”
This is an interesting case in which we'll watch arguments considering whether GPT-4 and Q* are AGI (or not) and a legal discussion of what AGI is.
Musk hasn't been very lucky: OpenAI answered boldly and has recently released some of Musk's early emails, and it looks like he shot himself in the foot (read the last email).
I've been keeping up with AI lawsuits on a daily basis, and on all three fonts, it looks like things are still warming up. If you have friends who would like to know more about the topic, share this article with them:
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🔍 Kal·AI·doscope #5
As the privacy & copyright lawsuits against OpenAI pile up, there is a clear message about AI training. Data protection authorities, take note! I explain it in 1 minute, watch:
Every week, I share a short video with my commentary on an AI-related topic. Watch the full Kal·AI·doscope playlist here.
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All the best, Luiza