A lawsuit against OpenAI brought by Sarah Silverman is set to continue, despite some sections of the case being dismissed. OpenAI and Meta faced the lawsuit, instigated by the comedian in July 2023, after allegations that AI models were trained on her books and other material without her permission. It has been reported that the unfair competition part of the claim will be allowed to go ahead, with a deadline of March 13 for modifications to the lawsuit to be made.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the US District Court turned down parts of Silverman’s legal argument on Monday, including claims of negligence, unjust enrichment, DMCA violations and vicarious infringement. However, the central issue of the case – direct copyright infringement by OpenAI via training language learning models on copious amounts of books without authorisation – remains unresolved.
Although OpenAI lodged a dismissal request in August, this did not challenge the central copyright aspects of the lawsuit. While the case will move ahead, the judge hinted that the remaining charges could be preempted by the federal Copyright Act. Nevertheless, the court will not consider this until OpenAI raises such a preemption.
The American courts have yet to decide whether using copyrighted material to train large scale AI language models falls under the fair use doctrine. OpenAI confessed in a court document last month that the presently leading AI models could not be trained without utilising copyrighted content.
Silverman’s case against OpenAI mirrors a similar outcome of a case against Meta in San Francisco in November. The core copyright infringement claims remained after other elements of the case were dismissed. At that hearing, US District Judge Vince Chhabria referred to some of the dismissed charges as “nonsensical.”
OpenAI is also facing a copyright-related lawsuit from The New York Times, a group of nonfiction authors (which expanded following the initial lawsuit), and The Author’s Guild. The latter’s lawsuit includes authors such as George R.R. Martin, known for Game of Thrones, and John Grisham among its claimants.
