OpenAI Facing Legal Action Over Claims of Copyright Violation, Accused of Utilizing Authors’ Works to Train ChatGPT
On Wednesday, OpenAI was sued by two American authors in a federal court in San Francisco. The authors alleged in a proposed class action that OpenAI had improperly utilized their works to “train” its widely-used generative artificial intelligence system, ChatGPT.
Massachusetts-based authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad said ChatGPT mined information copied from thousands of books without permission, violating the authors’ copyrights.
A lawyer for the authors, Matthew Butterick, declined to comment. Representatives of Microsoft-backed private OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The material used to train the latest artificial intelligence systems has been the subject of several legal challenges. Plaintiffs include source code owners against OpenAI and Microsoft’s GitHub, as well as visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt.
The subjects of the lawsuit have argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted work.
ChatGPT responds to users’ text prompts in a conversational manner. Earlier this year, it became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, reaching 100 million active users in January, just two months after its launch.
ChatGPT and other generative AI systems create content using large amounts of data scraped from the Internet. According to Tremblay and Awad’s suit, the books are a “key ingredient” because they provide “the best examples of high-quality long-form writing.”
The complaint estimated that OpenAI’s educational data contained more than 300,000 books, including those from illegal “shadow libraries” that offer copyrighted books without permission.
Awad is known for novels such as “13 Ways to Look at a Fat Girl” and “Bunny”. Tremblay’s novels include “The Cabin at the End of the World,” which was adapted into the M. Night Shyamalan movie “Knock at the Cabin,” released in February.
Tremblay and Awad said ChatGPT was able to generate “very accurate” summaries of their books, indicating that they appeared in its database.
The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of damages on behalf of a nationwide group of copyright owners whose works OpenAI allegedly misused.
