A California-based law firm has filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the artificial-intelligence company violated the copyrights and privacy of countless people when it used data scraped from the internet to train its ChatGPT chatbot.

The lawsuit, filed by Perkins Coie on behalf of lead plaintiff Michael Clarkson, seeks damages for all individuals whose data was used by OpenAI to train ChatGPT. The lawsuit also seeks an injunction to prevent OpenAI from further using such data.

“OpenAI has engaged in a massive violation of the privacy and copyrights of millions of people,” Clarkson said in a statement. “They have built their business on the backs of others without their consent, and it is time for them to be held accountable.”

OpenAI has not yet responded to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI scraped data from a variety of sources, including social media posts, blog articles, and Wikipedia entries. The data was then used to train ChatGPT, which is a large language model that can generate text, translate languages, and answer questions.

The lawsuit argues that OpenAI’s use of this data violated the copyrights of the individuals who created it. It also argues that OpenAI’s use of the data violated the privacy of those individuals, as it did not obtain their consent to use their personal information.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges facing OpenAI. In May, the company was sued by a radio host in Georgia who said that ChatGPT produced a text that wrongfully accused him of fraud.

The lawsuit against OpenAI comes at a time when the use of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly prevalent. As AI companies race to develop new and more powerful technologies, they are increasingly turning to data scraping to train their models.

This practice has raised concerns about privacy and copyright infringement. The lawsuit against OpenAI is one of the first to challenge the legality of data scraping for AI training.

The outcome of the lawsuit could have a significant impact on the future of AI development. If the lawsuit is successful, it could force AI companies to change the way they train their models. This could slow down the development of AI, but it could also protect the privacy and copyrights of individuals.

The lawsuit is still in its early stages, and it is not clear how it will be resolved. However, it is a sign that the legal challenges facing AI companies are likely to increase in the years to come.