Sarah Silverman a comedian and author, and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey are suing OpenAI and Meta in separate cases in a US District Court over claims of copyright infringement, per The Verge.

The authors supremely allege that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired data containing their books. They say they were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”

In the OpenAI suit, ChatGPT will summarize the author's books, infringing on their copyrights. They prove it when asking the bot to summarize Sarah Silverman’s Bedwetter, Golden’s book Ararat, and Kadrey’s book Sandman Slim. They claim the chatbot didn't “reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works.”

In the Meta lawsuit, it alleges Meta trained its LLaMA models on the authors’ books accessible in datasets. The data here, they claim, was also acquired illegally. In a Meta paper detailing LLaMA, the company has a training source called ThePile, assembled by a company called EleutherAI. ThePile was put together from “a copy of the contents of the Bibliotik private tracker.” Bibliotik and the other “shadow libraries” listed are “flagrantly illegal.”

For both claims, the authors “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material” for the companies’ AI models. Their lawsuits each contain six counts of various types of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. The authors are looking for statutory damages, restitution of profits, and more.