Plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit accusing OpenAI of violating the privacy of training data dropped their case against the company. The case was dismissed without prejudice, and the plaintiffs have the option of re-suing, according to court documents.The lawsuit, first filed in the Northern District of California in June, accuses OpenAI's spiders of "violating the property and privacy rights of all individuals whose personal information was scraped and misappropriated for inclusion in [OpenAI's] products."
The lawsuit does not name the plaintiffs, who are identified only by their initials. Clarkson Law Firm filed a class action lawsuit on their behalf.
OpenAI, like other generative AI companies, pulls publicly available data from the Internet to help train large language models.
Several lawsuits have been filed over how generative AI companies like OpenAI obtain and use publicly available data to train their models. Most cases revolve around thorny copyright rather than privacy issues. Comedian Sarah Silverman, writers Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI and Meta, accusing them of copyright infringement when training GPT-4 and Llama2.
In July, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into OpenAI’s possible harm to consumers through data collection and publishing false information.
In August, OpenAI said website owners can now block their web crawlers. Some websites, including news publishers like The New York Times, have blocked OpenAI from scraping their data.