Creatives all over are worried about what OpenAI could mean for not only their careers, but their likeness being copied without their permission – and Sarah Silverman, for one, isn’t going to sit around to wait and see how things shake out.

Instead she’s going on the offensive, filing a lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement.

She and two other authors claim that ChatGPT and Meta’s AI LLaMA were trained on their books without their consent.

AI chatbots collect data by culling content from the web without compensating creators, but whether or not artists like Silverman will be able to prove her copyright was violated in court is to be determined.

The authors claim that when you enter certain prompts into ChatGPT, it “generates summaries of Plantiffs’ copyrighted works – something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”

“Defendants, by and through the use of ChatGPT, benefit commercial and profit richly from the use of Plaintiffs’ and Class members’ copyrighted materials.”

Silverman in particular claims that ChatGPT reproduced entire passages from The Bedwetter verbatim.

This is not the first (or likely the last) challenge to AI on copyright grounds. A group of artists sued Stability AI earlier this year, and Getty Images is also embroiled in a lawsuit against Stability for copyright infringement.

Last month, a law firm in California filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI as well, the company is really feeling the heat.

Most people don’t think that it’s enough heat to halt AI in its tracks, but it does seem likely that they might have to find a way to square financially with the artists whose works they are using without permission.

Time will tell.