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ChatGPT creator OpenAI has caught itself in a lawsuit after it allegedly stole private data in an effort to better train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
According to the 157-page lawsuit document, OpenAI fed its language models with 300 billion words that were systematically scraped from online sources, including “books, articles, websites and posts — including personal information obtained without consent”, and kept it all in secret, fuelling the creation of an “AI arms race”.
“This class action lawsuit arises from defendants’ unlawful and harmful conduct in developing, marketing, and operating their AI products, including ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4.0, 4 Dall-E, and Vall-E (the ‘Products’), which use stolen private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge,” said the document.
“Furthermore, defendants continue to unlawfully collect and feed additional personal data from millions of unsuspecting consumers worldwide, far in excess of any reasonably authorised use, in order to continue developing and training the Products.”
The plaintiff has named not only OpenAI as a defendant in the lawsuit, but Microsoft as well, due to its cumulative investment of US$13 billion (just under $20 billion) in the AI start-up.
On top of the theft of data, the lawsuit said that OpenAI’s actions could lead to “civilisational collapse”, based on a quote from the late Stephen Hawking.
“Success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. But it could also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks,” said Hawking in 2016, saying that humanity would need to learn to harness the benefits of AI or it could be the “worst thing ever to happen to humanity”.
The plaintiff claims that OpenAI and Microsoft disregarded the risk that AI presents to humanity as much as it does the privacy laws it breached, using a quote from OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.
“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies,” Altman said.
Based on the number of harmed individuals, which is expected to be in the millions, the lawsuit is citing US$3 billion (over $4.5 billion) in potential damages. In addition, the plaintiffs have requested that commercial access to ChatGPT and other OpenAI products be frozen, along with the development of said products.
OpenAI has not been without its data security issues, with security researchers discovering earlier this month that the OpenAI logins for 100,000 accounts were up for sale on the dark web.
Cyber security organisation Group-IB found that the logs of a number of info-stealing malware programs, such as Raccoon, Vidar and RedLine, contained details of the stolen accounts.
Prior to that, ChatGPT accidentally blurted out the chat logs of its users due to a bug that was discovered in March.
Altman quickly took to social media to reveal that the issue had been fixed but that, as a result, “a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other user’s conversation history”.
we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 22, 2023
a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history.
we feel awful about this.
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