Authors vs. AI: Sarah Silverman Details Her Lawsuit Against OpenAI on Rob Lowe’s Podcast

On today’s episode of SiriusXM’s “Literally! With Rob Lowe” podcast, Sarah Silverman gave a rare insight into her ongoing high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement.

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“AI is the future. It’s gonna happen with or without us,” Sarah told Rob. “It’s gonna hopefully [do] wonderful things … but they educate the AI. The AI wasn’t born knowing everything. They have to educate. They load information onto it. And so they used many, many, many, many — beyond many — books that are copyrighted and that people wrote.”

She continued, “I’m in this lawsuit with authors that subsidized their income by teaching, and these are journeymen writers and all sorts of authors. They stole these books to educate their systems. They used our books without our knowledge, without our consent, without any compensation, whatever, you know, even if it was the price of the book. But you can’t do that. It’s not legal to do that.”

Sarah described AI as “artificial, but it isn’t really intelligence” because it “[takes] the works and thoughts and ideas of human beings and just [divorces] them from those human beings” with “a different price tag on it.”

“Right now, I could say to AI, ‘Write me a best man speech in the voice of Sarah Silverman.’ It would do it. It would do it right now,” Rob said. “So you have to ask yourself, ‘How did it learn to write like Sarah Silverman?’ And the answer is, it’s digested a lot of your work.”

Calling tech “the Wild West,” Sarah noted the industry’s unofficial slogan of “move fast and break things” and how long it takes for government regulations to catch up to that speed.

According to Sarah, a lawyer she went to high school with reached out to her about being part of the lawsuit against OpenAI because her book was used to train their artificial intelligence models.

“Don’t you think where it ends up is, they create a pool and that you, everybody, is entitled to a certain percentage?” Rob asked.

“They have to ask … I mean, it’s just like anything else. It’s copyrighted. It’s intellectual property,” Sarah said.

When it comes to authors and creators whose works have already been used in AI, Rob asked Sarah how OpenAI could rectify that or has “the horse left the barn” already.

“It has. But also, the horse left the barn — I can’t stay with that analogy, actually. I mean, they just, they did it illegally, so, I mean, I don’t know. I get it. They are the richest entities in the world, and we live in a country where that’s considered a person that can influence — practically create — policy, let alone influence it. So, yeah, it’s gonna be tough.”

About ‘Literally! With Rob Lowe’

A podcast where people Rob loves, admires, and knows well are in a safe space to really let their hair down (assuming they have any). Rob covers the thoughtful to the extremely random with guests from the world of movies, TV, sports, music, and culture for fun, wide-ranging, free-wheeling conversations.

On the November 21, 2024, episode, Sarah Silverman joins Rob to discuss their love of classic sitcoms, her lawsuit with OpenAI, the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” her new podcast, and much more.

New episodes of “Literally! With Rob Lowe” drop every Thursday on the SiriusXM app.