Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman (born 1970) is an American comedian, actress, and writer — an Emmy winner known for The Sarah Silverman Program, her political satire, and her 2010 memoir The Bedwetter, which became an off-Broadway musical. She has never been shy about a fight, and in 2023 she picked one with two of the biggest companies in AI.

Silverman v. the shadow libraries

In July 2023, Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey filed twin lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta, alleging the companies trained ChatGPT and LLaMA on pirated copies of their books scraped from “shadow library” sites. Exhibits showed ChatGPT producing detailed summaries of The Bedwetter — evidence, the complaints argued, that the whole book had been ingested “without consent, without credit and without compensation.”

The suits became the template for a wave of creator litigation, but the courts have been unkind: a judge trimmed most of the Meta claims in late 2023, and in June 2025 Meta won summary judgment on fair-use grounds — though the judge pointedly noted the ruling did not establish that training on copyrighted books is lawful in general, only that these plaintiffs had argued it wrong.

Silverman herself has been more fatalist than firebrand. Discussing the case on Rob Lowe’s podcast in 2024, she conceded that AI “is the future” and will happen “with or without us” — her objection is that the industry built that future on books it took without asking, and that suing “the richest entities in the world” is what accountability looks like when they do.