OpenAI and Microsoft Face Class-Action Lawsuit Over Data Scraping

OpenAI and Microsoft Face Class-Action Lawsuit Over Alleged Data Scraping

OpenAI and Microsoft have been named as defendants in yet another class-action lawsuit alleging that they used web scraping techniques to gather allegedly private data for the purpose of building ChatGPT and other connected artificial intelligence (AI) models.

A law firm representing two anonymous engineers filed the most recent class-action suit on September 5 in San Francisco.

A filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California states:

“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, 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.”

Following its restructuring in 2019, OpenAI “doubled down on a strategy to secretly harvest massive amounts of personal data from the internet,” according to the lawsuit.

“Without this unprecedented theft of private and copyrighted information belonging to real people,” the plaintiffs argue, “the products,” referring to ChatGPT, DALL-E, and OpenAI’s other models, “would not be the multi-billion-dollar business that they are today.”

The plaintiffs are seeking the courts to award damages to the plaintiffs and any members of the proposed classes, which could theoretically encompass everyone whose information was allegedly scraped, according to the document.

The petition also requests that the courts order the defendants to pay “non-restitutionary disgorgement” of earnings made as a result of the alleged illegal data scraping.

Scraping is the practice of collecting data from the internet using an automated bot, sometimes known as a “crawler.” The most recent lawsuit claims that OpenAI and Microsoft participated in “illegal” scraping activity on purpose.

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