The US company OpenAI is threatened with a legal dispute: In a class action lawsuit, the ChatGPT maker is accused of stealing personal data. Investor Microsoft is also the target of the lawsuit.
• Lawsuit filed against ChatGPT maker OpenAI
• Allegations of illegal data collection and collection of private data
• Claimed damages
The chatbot ChatGPT has conquered the tech world in recent months. The language model, based on artificial intelligence and already in use in numerous companies and homes, has sparked a race for artificial intelligence dominance. Fed by numerous data, ChatGPT is constantly learning. The origin of the data is not clear to outsiders: ChatGPT does not provide any specific references to sources. This circumstance has now brought the maker of the AI, the US company OpenAI, a lawsuit.
Class action lawsuit filed against OpenAI
On June 28, the law firm Clarkson filed a class action lawsuit against the nonprofit and major investor Microsoft in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit alleges that the ChatGPT maker has violated copyrights and the privacy of Internet users on a large scale.
Specifically, the plaintiffs accuse OpenAI of having tapped large amounts of data from the Internet. Despite Open AI’s “absolute secrecy” regarding its data collection and practices, it is known “at the highest level” that the company used (at least) five different datasets to train ChatGPT. This includes Wikipedia articles, social media posts, books or a web crawler. However, there was no compensation for the authors of the texts, as the complaint shows.
“Despite established protocols for the acquisition and use of personal data, the defendants used a different approach: theft,” the allegation continues. They had “systematically used 300 billion words from the Internet, books, articles, websites and posts – including personal data obtained without consent”. This was done in secret and without OpenAI registering as a data broker as required.
Also theft of personal data for profit
In addition to potential copyright infringement, the lawsuit also focuses on the potential theft of personal data.
OpenAI stole data from “millions of unsuspecting consumers worldwide”, including data from children of all ages, to enable the chatbot to emulate human speech. The chatbot collects “huge amounts of personal data from the Internet”, such as private conversations, medical data and more, without asking users’ permission.
According to the plaintiffs, OpenAI acted out of greed for profit: “Without this unprecedented theft of private and copyrighted data belonging to real people, which was shared with individual communities for a specific purpose, the products would not have become part of the multi-million dollar business they are today”. In the pursuit of profit, OpenAI has abandoned its original principle of advancing artificial intelligence “in ways that are most likely to benefit all of humanity,” the plaintiffs claim.
It should be possible to object to the use of data
The claim of the plaintiffs includes in particular that OpenAI provides its chatbot with an option that users can refuse to collect their own data.
In addition, the plaintiffs are demanding damages and temporarily freezing commercial access to the OpenAI products and their further development.
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