Lawsuit Filed Against OpenAI For Allegedly Using Writers’ Work To Train ChatGPT: Read More
A group of US authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, have sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, accusing the Microsoft-backed program of misusing their writings to train the popular AI-powered ChatGPT.
Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman said in the lawsuit Friday that OpenAI copied their works without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts.
Chabon’s representatives referred questions about the lawsuit to the authors’ lawyers. Those attorneys and OpenAI representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.
The lawsuit is at least the third proposed copyright infringement class-action lawsuit filed by its creators against Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Copyright owners have also sued companies such as Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and Stability AI over the use of their works in AI training.
OpenAI and other companies have argued that AI training uses copyrighted material scraped fairly from the Internet.
ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, before being overtaken by Meta’s Threads app.
The new San Francisco lawsuit stated that works such as books, plays, and articles are especially valuable to ChatGPT’s education as “the best examples of high-quality, long-form writing.”
The authors claimed that their writing was included in ChatGPT’s training dataset without their permission, claiming that the system could accurately summarize their works and generate text that mimicked their styles.
The lawsuit sought an unspecified amount in damages and an injunction restraining OpenAI’s “unlawful and improper business practices.”
