Authors File Lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for Copyright Infringement, US

Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff, and Kai Bird have joined a class-action lawsuit in Manhattan, alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft have violated copyright laws by using their works to train artificial intelligence algorithms. The authors claim that the companies have built a business worth billions of dollars by taking the combined works of humanity without permission. They argue that OpenAI’s GPT language models have made commercial reproductions of copyrighted works without proper licenses or compensation. The lawsuit alleges that the defendants’ models were calibrated by reproducing a massive corpus of copyrighted material, including nonfiction books. The authors contend that OpenAI’s ChatGPT would not exist without their work, and that both OpenAI and Microsoft have earned profits through their exploitative efforts. The lawsuit emphasizes that the commercial success has come at the expense of the writers, as the defendants have not paid for the books used to train their models nor sought licenses for copying and exploiting the protected expression in the copyrighted works. OpenAI and Microsoft have not yet responded to requests for comment on the matter.