In the latest skirmish between Sarah Silverman and other authors against Chat GPT-maker OpenAI, OpenAI submitted a new decision from a California federal court in support of its attempt to dismiss the Silverman plaintiffs’ claims. According to OpenAI, that other court rejected theories and claims that are nearly identical to Silverman’s claims against OpenAI. If the court hearing Silverman’s claims agrees, copyright holders looking to sue AI companies in the future may find themselves facing long odds on certain claims.

The new California decision cited by OpenAI comes in the wake of a similar decision in a case involving an AI image generator. Like the court in that image-generator case, the new decision cited by OpenAI dismissed most of the plaintiffs’ copyright claims and other claims, although it did so with leave to amend all but one state-law negligence claim. The court in this new decision rejected as “nonsensical” the plaintiffs’ argument that large language models (or LLMs) “are themselves infringing derivative works,” holding that “[t]here is no way to understand the [LLMs] themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs’ books.” Similarly, the court rejected the notion that “every output of the [LLMs] is an infringing derivative work,” stating that “the complaint offers no allegation of the contents of any output, let alone of one that could be understood as recasting, transforming, or adapting the plaintiffs’ books. Without any plausible allegation of an infringing output, there can be no vicarious infringement.”Continue Reading “The Plaintiffs Are Wrong”: OpenAI Submits New Authority in Attempt to Knock Out Sarah Silverman’s Claims