A group of anonymous individuals claimed that ChatGPT creator OpenAI Inc is stealing a vast amount of personal information to train its artificial intelligence models in a heedless hunt for profits. They have filed a lawsuit against the company and sought a class action status.
In the 157-page lawsuit, the individuals claimed that OpenAI has violated privacy laws by secretly scraping 300 billion words from the internet, tapping content including personal information obtained without consent, according to Bloomberg reports.
The Clarkson Law Firm on Wednesday filed a suit against ChatGPT creator on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco. They cite $3 billion in potential damages.
“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” they allege as quoted by Bloomberg News.
They said that ChatGPT along with the company’s other products is trained on private information taken from hundreds of millions of internet users without their permission.
Congress is debating the potential and dangers of artificial intelligence as the products raise questions about the future of creative industries and the ability to tell fact from fiction.
Last month, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman himself called for AI regulation. The company 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.
The lawsuit reads, “OpenAI illegally accesses private information from individuals’ interactions with its products and from applications that have integrated ChatGPT.”
“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,” it added.
The plaintiffs also claimed that OpenAI abandoned its original principle of advancing artificial intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.
The suit puts ChatGPT’s expected revenue for 2023 at $200 million, as per Bloomberg reports.
The group is also asking the court to temporarily freeze commercial access to and further development of OpenAI’s products.
(With Bloomberg inputs)
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Updated: 02 Jul 2023, 09:49 AM IST
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