Landmark Federal Class-Action Against OpenAI Seeks to Protect Privacy and Property Rights and Prevent Existential Risks
Today, Clarkson Law Firm, the prominent California based public interest firm, filed a federal class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California against OpenAI and Microsoft. The suit alleges that the companies stole and misappropriated personal data at an unprecedented scale to train unpredictable AI products that leading AI experts believe should be prioritized alongside societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.
“OpenAI and Microsoft admit they do not fully understand the technology at the center of the arms race they’ve ignited” said Ryan Clarkson, managing partner of Clarkson. “They’ve released it into the world anyway, and it’s rapidly entangling itself with every aspect of our lives.”
AI experts agree that unless safeguards are implemented, AI poses immediate risks to civilization, beginning with the loss of privacy, the breakdown of content-based verification systems that our institutions depend on, and loss of trust through the proliferation of scams, lies, and deepfakes that sow civil unrest. Many predict widespread job loss from AI supplanting both blue- and white-collar workers by misappropriating their stolen skillsets. And perhaps most troubling, experts fear generative AI may be used in autonomous weapons systems that change the incentive structure for starting wars, and creation of an artificial general intelligence that works against humanity’s interests. Clarkson’s lawsuit alleges that people didn’t consent to use of their personal information for those purposes.
“Our data is our property, our data is valuable, and we do not abandon our property and privacy rights in it simply by going online and sharing information for discrete purposes,” said Timothy K. Giordano, partner at Clarkson Law Firm. “By collecting previously obscure personal data of millions and misappropriating it to develop a volatile, untested technology, OpenAI put everyone in a zone of risk that is incalculable – but unacceptable by any measure of responsible data protection and use.”
To build what many consider the most transformative technology the world has ever known, OpenAI required vast amounts of data. Rather than paying for it, the lawsuit alleges the tech companies secretly scraped the personal data of everyone who has ever used the internet, including children of all ages. The class action further alleges this data was taken without notice, consent, or just compensation.
“When we’re talking about the scope of consumers whose data has been taken to enhance these artificial intelligence language models, it’s important to remember we’re often talking about minors,” said Tracey Cowan, partner at Clarkson Law Firm. “Their personal information, including the details of their lives, geolocation data, and photographs, have all been taken without proper consent and used as training data for OpenAI’s products. We can’t let these sharp corporate practices continue to go unchallenged, if for no other reason than to protect our children from the mass exploitation that we’re already seeing across the internet.”
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of adult and minor ChatGPT users and non-users throughout the United States, and adding more plaintiffs every day, seeks two major remedies. First, it asks for immediate injunctive relief, instituting a temporary freeze on further commercial use of this tech until reasonable guardrails can be put in place. Second, it seeks payment of “data dividends” as financial compensation to every person whose information was commercially misappropriated to help develop and train OpenAI’s language models, currently worth tens of billions of dollars.
For more details on the lawsuit, go to TogetherOn.ai.
