Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies’ AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent.

The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Francisco, California, alleges the two businesses ignored the legal means of obtaining data for their AI models and chose to gather it without paying for it.

“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” the complaint says. “They systematically scraped 300 billion words from the internet, ‘books, articles, websites and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.’ OpenAI did so in secret, and without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law.”

  • Edit: uh, wrong thread… I don’t know if I should delete this, but I’ll strike it out for now…

    You know, thinking about it… The only Google service I really use personally is YouTube without logging in and with ad block. My work email is through gmail, and I have some gmail accounts that I haven’t killed, but I self host my email now… I don’t have an android phone, and I use DuckDuckGo… My browser is Firefox. I haven’t really gone out of my way to remove Google intentionally, it’s just sort of happened gradually and has been a death by a thousand cuts. I used to have a Pixel, but I got fed up with the lack of long term support on Android devices and they’d always die on me… I used to have Google Fi for my phone plan, but it was just more expensive and the support wasn’t great… honestly any Google product has terrible customer support because they kind of build things hoping you’ll never have to talk to a human.

      • YEP I DID. This was meant to be on the post about degoogling… I feel like I keep having a problem with Lemmy where I end up on the wrong post when I click? It’s super weird… Am I the only one that ends up on the weird sports post all the time when I didn’t go there?

          • Okay. I will feel less shame… I could have sworn I was on the right thread… I clicked on it, check the post, checked the image… but I guess it took me a while to write the comment and they pulled the old switcharoo on me. I thought I was going insane.

  • I’m not surprised.

    The first time I ever opened OpenAI website, they straight away asked for a mobile number. There is no way I was interested in using this tech while being surveilled. People tend to open their hearts desire in front of AI.

  • Really hate how everyone is flipping their lid about large language model datasets and output, when the actual focus should be models specifically built for use against the general public. It’s like flipping out at someone for reading a letter you put on the bulletin board to their robot while ignoring the person looking through your personal thoughts with a machine built specifically to read your mind.

    Maybe they’ll succeed and hinder progress in AI, so we fail to develop sufficiently advanced AI before our world collapses from environmental failure. At least the advertisers will know how to push our buttons the right way to get us to buy something we don’t need.