Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies’ AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent.
The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Francisco, California, alleges the two businesses ignored the legal means of obtaining data for their AI models and chose to gather it without paying for it.
“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” the complaint says. “They systematically scraped 300 billion words from the internet, ‘books, articles, websites and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.’ OpenAI did so in secret, and without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law.”
Really hate how everyone is flipping their lid about large language model datasets and output, when the actual focus should be models specifically built for use against the general public. It’s like flipping out at someone for reading a letter you put on the bulletin board to their robot while ignoring the person looking through your personal thoughts with a machine built specifically to read your mind.
Maybe they’ll succeed and hinder progress in AI, so we fail to develop sufficiently advanced AI before our world collapses from environmental failure. At least the advertisers will know how to push our buttons the right way to get us to buy something we don’t need.