OpenAI and Meta, the creators of ChatGPT, are being sued by Sarah Silverman and other authors for alleged copyright infringement

Sarah Silverman, a comedian, and two authors have sued Meta Platforms and OpenAI for allegedly utilising their work without permission to train artificial intelligence language models.

Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden filed proposed class action lawsuits in San Francisco federal court on Friday, alleging that Facebook parent company Meta and ChatGPT developer OpenAI misappropriated copyrighted information to teach chatbots.

On Sunday, Meta and OpenAI, a private startup supported by Microsoft, did not reply to calls for comment.

The lawsuits highlight the legal issues that chatbot developers face when employing troves of copyrighted content to construct programmes that provide realistic replies to user inputs.

According to Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden, Meta and OpenAI utilised their books without permission to construct their so-called big language models, which its creators tout as strong tools for automating jobs by simulating human speech.

The plaintiffs argue in their complaint against Meta that leaked information concerning the company's artificial intelligence division demonstrates that their work was exploited without consent.

According to the lawsuit filed against OpenAI, summaries of the plaintiffs' work created by ChatGPT demonstrate that the bot was trained on their copyrighted works.

"The summaries get some details wrong," but they nonetheless prove that ChatGPT "retains knowledge of specific works in the training dataset," according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuits seek undisclosed monetary damages on behalf of a broad class of allegedly infringing copyright owners.