Sarah Silverman vs. AI: A New Punchline in the Battle for Ethical Digital Borders

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Generative AI is no joke, as Sarah Silverman proved when she sued OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, and Meta for copyright infringement. She and novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey claim that companies trained their LLMs on authors' published works without their consent, wading into new legal territory.

A week earlier, a class action lawsuit was filed against OpenAI. Much of this case rests on the premise that generative AI models use the information of unsuspecting people in ways that violate their guaranteed right to privacy. These filings come as nations around the world grapple with the scope of AI, its implications for consumers, and the kinds of regulations – and remedies – needed to control its power.

Without a doubt, we are in a race against time to prevent future damage, but we must also find a way to remedy our current precarious state without destroying existing models or depleting their value. If we are serious about protecting consumers' right to privacy, companies must take it upon themselves to develop and enforce a new type of AI-specific ethical use policies.

The question of data – who has access to it, for what purpose, and whether consent has been given to use their data for that purpose – is at the heart of the generational AI conundrum. So much data is already part of existing models, informing them in ways that were previously inconceivable. And mountains of information continue to be added every day.

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This is problematic because, by nature, consumers did not realize that their information and queries, intellectual property, and artistic creations could be applied to power AI models. Seemingly innocuous interactions are now being picked up and used for training. When models analyze this data, it opens up entirely new levels of understanding patterns of behavior and interests based on data that consumers have never consented to be used for such purposes.

In a nutshell, this means that chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard, as well as AI models created and used by companies of all kinds, mine information they technically have no right to indefinitely.

And despite the...