Open AI, the maker of the very popular chatbot ChatGPT, a natural language processing artificial intelligence (AI) tool, is facing a class-action lawsuit in California over the alleged scrapping of private user information from the internet. 

The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in the northern district of California on Wednesday morning by Clarkson, a native law firm. The suit has alleged that Open AI trained the ChatGPT model using data collected from millions of social media comments, blog posts, Wikipedia articles and family recipes without the consent of the respective users. Thus, OpenAI violated the copyrights and privacy of millions of internet users.

The 16 named plaintiffs in the case claimed that Open AI illegally accessed private information from individuals’ interactions with ChatGPT. If these allegations are proven to be true, the accused will be in breach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — a law that has precedent for web scraping cases. Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI was also named a defendant in the case. Open AI didn’t respond to Cointelegraph’s requests for comments at press time.

The lawsuit alleged further that OpenAI products “use stolen private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge.”

“By collecting previously obscure personal data of millions and misappropriating it to develop a volatile, untested technology, OpenAI put everyone in a zone of risk that is incalculable – but unacceptable by any measure of responsible data protection and use,” Clarkson said.

AI tech has gained a lot of traction over the past year owing to the massive popularity of ChatGPT. The rise of AI Tech has also nudged governments around the world to take notice and the likes of the United States and Europe have already proposed certain legislation around the nascent industry.

Related: US vice president gathers top tech CEOs to discuss dangers of AI

On June 20, a bipartisan set of US lawmakers introduced National AI Commission Act, a bill focused on setting a commission to study the country’s approach towards AI. Similarly, the European Parliament passed the EU AI Act in the second week of June. The legislation would establish a framework for governance and oversight of the AI industry in the European Union.

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