ChatGPT creator OpenAI sued $3bn for stealing private data to train its AI

ChatGPT creator OpenAI Inc. has been sued for stealing “vast amounts” of personal information to train its artificial intelligence models in a heedless hunt for profits. Together with Microsoft, its major backer, the company was 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 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.

The plaintiffs are described by their occupations or interests but identified only by initials for fear of a backlash against them, the Clarkson Law Firm said in the suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco. They cite $3 billion in potential damages, based on a category of harmed individuals they estimate to be in the millions.

The lawsuit

OpenAI has violated privacy laws by secretly scraping 300 billion words from the internet, tapping “books, articles, websites and posts — including personal information obtained without consent,” according to the sprawling, 157-page lawsuit.

“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.” the lawsuit states.

According to the suit, the two companies, 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, emails, payment information, transaction records, browser data, social media information, chat logs, usage data, analytics, cookies, searches, and other online activity.

The suit did not shy away from also accusing the companies of risking “civilizational collapse”, giving the enormous information it has collected, stored and processed in its AI products.

“With respect to personally identifiable information, defendants fail sufficiently to filter it out of the training models, putting millions at risk of having that information disclosed on prompt or otherwise to strangers around the world,” the complaint says, citing The Register’s March 18, 2021, special report on the subject.

OpenAI developed a family of text-generating large language models, which includes GPT-2, GPT-4, and ChatGPT; Microsoft not only champions the technology but has been cramming it into all corners of its empire, from Windows to Azure.

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 is yet to respond for both OpenAI and Microsoft on the $3 billion lawsuit.

Scepticisms surrounding AI

While ChatGPT, the well-known AI language model, is undeniably a tremendously fascinating piece of technology, there are significant concerns that it and other generative AI applications have accompanying consequences especially regarding privacy and misinformation.

Globally, experts, businesses, organisations and governments have begun to take steps to limit its usage. Currently, the US Congress is debating the potential and dangers of AI as the products raise questions about the future of creative industries and the ability to tell fact from fiction.

Just a few months ago, the leaders of OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, also called for stricter regulations for “super-intelligent” AIs in order to save the world from destruction in the hands of these machines.

Co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever and the chief executive, Sam Altman, say that an equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the agency in charge of checking the use and application of atomic and nuclear energy globally, is needed to protect humanity from the risk of accidentally creating something with the power to destroy it.

More recently, a court in the US was also thrown into pandemonium when a lawyer brought before it false cases as precedents to support his argument in a case in New York. Turns out he had asked ChatGPT for examples of cases that supported the argument and ChatGPT, in its usual form, hallucinated wildly—it invented several supporting cases out of thin air.

These and numerous more instances are what led to the scepticism that has surrounded the global development and acceptance of generative AI. Several people have even started to fear that it will replace people and take their jobs. This scepticism is even more heightened by the latest scrapping of people’s information and data by OpenAI.

Misappropriating personal data on a vast scale to win an “AI arms race,” the plaintiffs claim that OpenAI illegally accesses private information from individuals’ interactions with its products and from applications that have integrated ChatGPT. Such integrations allow the company to gather image and location data from Snapchat, music preferences on Spotify, financial information from Stripe and private conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams, according to the suit.

Chasing profits, OpenAI has abandoned its original principle of advancing artificial intelligence “in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” the plaintiffs allege. The suit puts ChatGPT’s expected revenue for 2023 at $200 million.