ChatGPT creator OpenAI is stealing “vast amounts” of personal information to train its artificial intelligence models in a heedless hunt for profits, a group of anonymous individuals claimed in a lawsuit seeking class action status.
OpenAI has violated privacy laws by secretly scraping 300
billion words from the internet, tapping “books, articles, websites and posts —
including personal information obtained without consent,” according to the
sprawling, 157-page lawsuit. It doesn't shy from sweeping language, accusing
the company of risking “civilizational collapse.”
The plaintiffs are described by their occupations or
interests but identified only by initials for fear of a backlash against them,
the Clarkson Law Firm said in the suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San
Francisco. They cite $3 billion in
potential damages, based on a category of harmed individuals they estimate to
be in the millions.
A different approach: Theft
“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of
personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” they
allege. The company's popular chatbot program ChatGPT and other products are
trained on private information taken from what the plaintiffs described as hundreds
of millions of internet users, including children, without their permission.
Microsoft, which plans to invest a reported $13 billion in
OpenAI, was also named as a defendant.
A spokesperson for OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a
call or email seeking comment on the lawsuit. A spokesperson for Microsoft
didn't respond right away to an email.
ChatGPT and other generative AI applications have stirred
intense interest in the technology's promise but also sparked a firestorm over
privacy and misinformation. Congress is debating the potential and dangers of
AI as the products raise questions about the future of creative industries and
the ability to tell fact from fiction. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam
Altman himself, in testimony on Capitol Hill last month, called for AI
regulation. But the lawsuit focuses on how OpenAI got the guts of its products
to begin with.
Secret scraping
OpenAI, which is at the forefront of the burgeoning
industry, is accused in the suit of conducting an enormous clandestine
web-scraping operation, violating terms of service agreements and state and
federal privacy and property laws. One of the laws cited is the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act, a federal anti-hacking statute that has been invoked in scraping
disputes before. The suit also includes claims of invasion of privacy, larceny,
unjust enrichment and violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Misappropriating personal data on a vast scale to win an “AI
arms race,” OpenAI illegally accesses private information from individuals'
interactions with its products and from applications that have integrated
ChatGPT, the plaintiffs claim. Such integrations allow the company to gather
image and location data from Snapchat, music preferences on Spotify, financial
information from Stripe and private conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams,
according to the suit.
Chasing profits, OpenAI abandoned its original principle of
advancing artificial intelligence “in the way that is most likely to benefit
humanity as a whole,” the plaintiffs allege. The suit puts ChatGPT's expected
revenue for 2023 at $200 million.
While seeking to represent the massive class of allegedly
harmed individuals, and requesting monetary damages to be determined at trial,
the plaintiffs are also asking the court to temporarily freeze commercial
access to and further development of OpenAI's products. © Bloomberg L.P.
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