A California law firm filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI alleging the company violated copyrights and privacy of millions of people by scraping their social media comments, blog posts, Wikipedia articles and other internet data without consent to train ChatGPT.
In June 2023, Clarkson Law Firm filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in the Northern District of California against OpenAI, alleging the company violated the copyrights and privacy rights of millions of internet users. The lawsuit claims OpenAI scraped 300 billion words from the internet, including personal information from social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, blog posts, Wikipedia articles, and family recipes, to train its AI models including ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4.0, Dall-E, and Vall-E without users' informed consent or knowledge. The firm alleges OpenAI failed to register as a data broker as required by law and conducted this data collection in secret. The lawsuit includes 15 counts including violation of privacy, negligence for failing to protect personal data, and larceny by illegally obtaining massive amounts of personal data. The case seeks to represent 'real people whose information was stolen and commercially misappropriated to create this very powerful technology' and aims to establish guardrails on how AI algorithms are trained and how people are compensated when their data is used. OpenAI has reportedly profited billions from this technology through Microsoft investments and ChatGPT Plus subscriptions.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that memorize and leak sensitive personal data or infer private information about individuals without their consent. Unexpected or unauthorized sharing of data and information can compromise user expectation of privacy, assist identity theft, or cause loss of confidential intellectual property.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Pre-deployment
Occurring before the AI is deployed