US trial# OpenAI and Microsoft were accused of stealing personal data on an "unprecedented scale" in serious violation of federal anti-hacking laws
Today (6/29/2023), 16 plaintiffs who used various internet services that resulted in personal information being stolen by OpenAI filed a nearly 160-page indictment in federal San Francisco court, alleging that OpenAI's generative AI programs ChatGPT and DALL-E were trained on "stolen private information" from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children, without permission. Microsoft, which just invested $10 billion in OpenAI, was also named as a co-defendant
OpenAI collected image and location data from Snapchat, music preferences from Spotify, financial information from Stripe, and private conversations from Slack and Microsoft Teams, and despite established agreements to purchase and use personal information, the defendants took a simple and crude approach: outright theft, the lawsuit alleged
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI secretly conducted a huge web search operation, and that federal anti-hacking laws, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and state and federal privacy and property laws
