OpenAI is a company dedicated to the development and deployment of artificial intelligence with a mission to ensure the inclusiveness and safety of artificial intelligence. Recently, however, the company was hit with a class-action lawsuit accused of "stealing private data" to train its AI models.
A group of anonymous people reportedly filed a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco, claiming that OpenAI secretly scraped 300 billion words of data from the internet, including books, articles, websites, and posts, involving personal information obtained without consent, in violation of privacy laws. The plaintiffs, estimated millions of people based on the category of individuals injured, raised a $3 billion potential loss.
An important product of OpenAI is ChatGPT, a dialogue system based on natural language processing that can communicate with users on a variety of topics. To train this system, OpenAI needs large amounts of text data to improve its language understanding and generation capabilities. However, in collecting and using this data, does OpenAI consider the legitimacy and rationality of the source of the data? Are the rights and wishes of the data owner respected? Is the privacy and sensitive information involved in the data protected?
These questions are not specific to OpenAI, but to the challenges facing the entire AI field. While pursuing technological progress and commercial interests, how should AI comply with ethical principles and social responsibility? How to balance innovation and regulation, freedom and protection, public and private? How to build a transparent, fair, credible and controllable AI ecosystem?
There are no simple answers to these questions and require the participation and consultation of many parties, including governments, businesses, academia, civil society, etc. Only after the establishment of effective institutional mechanisms and ethical norms can artificial intelligence truly realize its positive contribution to human society.