A group of 11 nonfiction writers have joined a Manhattan federal court lawsuit alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft misused their books to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. The authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff, and Kai Bird, claim that OpenAI’s GPT language models infringed their copyrights by utilizing their work without permission. The proposed class-action suit, initially filed by writer and Hollywood Reporter editor Julian Sancton, is the first to include Microsoft as a defendant. OpenAI, in which Microsoft has invested billions, and the tech giant itself have denied the allegations.
The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of scraping copyrighted material, including the authors’ works, from the internet to train its GPT models. The complaint emphasizes that Microsoft was deeply involved in training and developing these models, making the company also liable for copyright infringement. The authors seek monetary damages and an order for the companies to cease infringing their copyrights.
This case is among several copyright infringement lawsuits filed by authors against OpenAI. In September, the AI company was sued in a New York federal court by authors George R.R. Martin and John Grisham, among others. OpenAI and Microsoft are determined to fight these allegations.
In a separate development, a U.K. court recently ruled against an American computer scientist named Stephen Thaler in his appeal to register patents on AI-generated inventions. Thaler had previously lost a similar appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court, where the challenge to obtain patents for his AI-generated inventions was rejected.
It appears that concerns surrounding the use of copyrighted material in AI models extend beyond OpenAI and Microsoft. Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is reportedly facing a lawsuit from authors who claim their works were used without consent to train the company’s AI model, Llama.
These legal battles highlight the growing importance of copyright protection in the era of AI advancements. As more AI models are trained on existing works of literature, the issue of intellectual property rights becomes increasingly complex. The outcomes of these lawsuits could potentially shape the future landscape of AI development and its relationship with copyrighted material.
