Two Engineers Bring Class Action Lawsuit Against OpenAI, Microsoft – TechRepublic
Two Engineers Bring Class Action Lawsuit Against OpenAI, Microsoft
Your email has been sent
The complaint alleges OpenAI scraped personal information and professional expertise from the internet without permission to feed its AI models.
A product engineer and a software engineer are bringing OpenAI and its primary supporter Microsoft to San Francisco federal court with claims of stolen personal data, Reuters reported on September 6.
Jump to:
The plaintiffs, who are known only as A.T. and J.H. in the complaint, claim OpenAI used their personal information scraped from the internet to train generative artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT. Specifically, it claims OpenAI used personal data from social media, stealing their “skills and expertise” in order to make products that could “someday result in [their] professional obsolescence.”
SEE: OpenAI recently announced ChatGPT Enterprise, which they say handles business data securely. (TechRepublic)
The plaintiffs request that OpenAI and Microsoft make meaningful safeguards against the use of private data and add ethical guardrails. The plaintiffs also asked for an unspecified amount of money in damages.
According to the complaint, OpenAI can “unlawfully obtain access to and intercept this information [everything from physical location to keystrokes] from the individual users of applications and devices that have integrated ChatGPT-4.”
“Plaintiff J.H. reasonably expected that the information that he exchanged with these websites prior to their introduction would not be intercepted by any third party looking to compile and use all his information and data for commercial purposes,” the complaint reads.
This is the second lawsuit to cover some of the same ground. In June, the Clarkson Law Firm brought a similar complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft. The September complaint, filed by the personal injury firm Morgan & Morgan, quotes extensively from the complaint made in June.
Creative writers have brought lawsuits against OpenAI for scraping and profiting off of their writing through incorporating it into the massive amount of data on which a generative AI model is trained.
For example, comedian Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in July, and authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay filed a suit against OpenAI in July for allegedly training ChatGPT using their books.
In August, the New York Times revealed it was considering suing OpenAI to maintain intellectual property rights to the newspaper’s articles. The Times and OpenAI had originally been in talks regarding OpenAI paying the newspaper to use its content in AI tools. However, according to NPR’s anonymous sources, the conversation became a high-profile fight over how generative AI should be allowed to use writers’ original work.
The complaint notes a change in OpenAI’s stated goals around 2019, when it switched from a nonprofit dedicated to AI research to a for-profit, commercial model.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 with a stated goal of “advanc[ing] digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
Microsoft entered the mix in 2016, when the Redmond tech giant joined on a plan to “democratize” AI technology. OpenAI has shifted to a for-profit model as of March 2019 to try to raise more funds. Subsequently, OpenAI entered a partnership with Microsoft specifically to develop artificial general intelligence (theoretical human-level intelligence). Since then, Microsoft has invested billions in the AI company in support of a variety of products and platforms.
Learn the latest news and best practices about data science, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, data security, and more.
Two Engineers Bring Class Action Lawsuit Against OpenAI, Microsoft
Your email has been sent
Your message has been sent
TechRepublic Premium content helps you solve your toughest IT issues and jump-start your career or next project.
Microsoft is also running a grant competition for ideas on using AI training in community building.
Generative AI will be a game changer in cloud security, especially in common pain points like preventing threats, reducing toil from repetitive tasks, and bridging the cybersecurity talent gap.
Does your business need a payroll provider that offers international payroll services? Use our buyer’s guide to review the best solutions, from ADP to Oyster.
Get up and running with ChatGPT with this comprehensive cheat sheet. Learn everything from how to sign up for free to enterprise use cases, and start using ChatGPT quickly and effectively.
Looking for an alternative to monday.com? Our comprehensive list covers the best monday alternatives, their key features, pricing, pros, cons and more.
Learn the latest news and best practices about data science, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, data security, and more.
IT professionals, such as system and network administrators, help desk staff, management personnel and sometimes external vendor representatives, are routinely provided full access to company servers, network devices and data so that they can effectively perform their jobs. This policy from TechRepublic Premium provides guidelines for the company and its IT staff to ensure the …
Phone interviews can save time and speed up the hiring process. This cheat sheet from TechRepublic Premium will make it easy to ask both general and job-specific questions, allowing you to compare candidates systematically. Questions from the cheat sheet: Can you describe a work experience where you were part of a project or initiative and …
Amidst the growing landscape of data storage methods and functions, keeping up with the terminology used to describe the technology has become challenging as well. This quick glossary from TechRepublic Premium is intended to serve as a guide to defining common storage terms and noteworthy storage service providers. From the glossary: ASYNCHRONOUS REPLICATION Asynchronous replication …
Remote work has become a staple in the business world, especially in light of some companies permanently closing their office locations and transitioning their employees into a full remote work environment. The purpose of this policy from TechRepublic Premium is to establish appropriate guidelines for the remote workforce, including what sort of environments they should …
