ChatGPT creator OpenAI Inc. has been sued for stealing massive amounts of personal information to train its AI models in a reckless pursuit of profits. Chat owner GPT and Microsoft have been sued and hit with a $3 billion ($2.4 billion) class action lawsuit over alleged theft of data from hundreds of millions of Internet users. Along with Microsoft, its main backer, the company was sued on Wednesday by 16 pseudonymous individuals claiming the companies’ AI products based on ChatGPT collected and disclosed their personal information without proper notice or consent.
The lawsuit concerns OpenAI, which created the digital chatbot, and investor Microsoft developed the AI tools through secret Internet scraping. The complaint filed in California federal court alleges that the two companies ignored legal means to obtain data for their AI models and chose to collect it without paying for it.
Fearing a backlash, petitioners are described by their occupations or interests, but identified only by initials, the Clarkson law firm said in the lawsuit. They cite $3 billion in potential damages, based on a category of harmed individuals they estimate to number in the millions.
OpenAI data theft lawsuit
OpenAI violated privacy laws by secretly and systematically extracting 300 billion words from the internet, eavesdropping books, articles, websites and posts, including personal information obtained without consent, OpenAI did so without registering as a data intermediary, as required by applicable law. according to the rather large 157-page lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI and Microsoft, through their AI products, collect, store, track, share and disclose the personal information of millions of people, including product details, account information, names, contact details, login credentials , email, payment information, transaction logs, browser data, social media information, chat logs, usage data, analytics, cookies, searches and other online activity.
The lawsuit also accuses the companies of risking the collapse of civilization by giving away the extent of the information it has collected, stored and processed in its artificial intelligence products.
With respect to personally identifiable information, defendants fail to filter it sufficiently from training templates, putting millions at risk of that information being timely or otherwise disclosed to outsiders worldwidesays the complaint, citing I Registry March 18, 2021, special report on the matter.
The 157-page complaint is heavy on media and academic citations, expressing alarm about AI models and ethics but light on specific instances of harm. A spokesperson has yet to respond for both OpenAI and Microsoft on the $3 billion lawsuit.
Doubts about artificial intelligence
While ChatGPT is undeniably a tremendously fascinating piece of technology, there are significant concerns that it and other generative AI applications have accompanying consequences, particularly regarding privacy and misinformation.
Globally, experts, companies, organizations and governments have begun to take steps to limit its use. Currently, the US Congress is debating the potential and dangers of artificial intelligence as the products raise questions about the future of the creative industries and the ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
Just a few months ago, OpenAI leaders, the creators of ChatGPT, also called for tougher rules for super intelligent AIs in order to save the world from destruction at the hands of these machines.
Growing doubts have surrounded the global development and acceptance of generative AI. This is even more accentuated by OpenAI’s latest scrapping of information and data about people.
ChatGPT alleged misuse of private data
Misappropriating personal data on a massive scale to win an AI arms race, the signatories claim that OpenAI illegally accesses private information from individuals’ interactions with its products and from applications that have integrated ChatGPT. Those integrations allow the company to collect image and location data from Snapchat, music preferences on Spotify, financial information from Stripe, and private conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Pursuing profits, OpenAI has abandoned its original principle of advancing AI in the way most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, according to the petitioner. The data theft lawsuit puts OpenAI’s projected revenue for 2023 at $200 million.
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