Title: OpenAI Faces Lawsuit Over Misuse of Authors’ Works in ChatGPT Training
OpenAI, a prominent artificial intelligence company, is now confronting legal action as two acclaimed US-based authors, Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, have filed a proposed class action lawsuit in a San Francisco federal court. The authors claim that OpenAI unlawfully utilized their works to train its widely popular generative AI system, ChatGPT.
Awad and Tremblay, hailing from Massachusetts, accuse ChatGPT of mining data from thousands of books without proper authorization, thereby infringing upon their copyrights. The authors’ lawyer, Matthew Butterick, declined to comment on the matter, while OpenAI representatives have yet to respond to the allegations.
This lawsuit adds to the growing number of legal challenges concerning the use of copyrighted material in training advanced AI systems. In previous cases, source-code owners have taken legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft’s GitHub, as well as visual artists suing Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt.
OpenAI and other defendants involved in these lawsuits have argued that their systems fairly use copyrighted materials. ChatGPT, in particular, provides conversational responses to user text prompts, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. In just two months after its launch, the system garnered 100 million active users in January this year.
Generative AI systems like ChatGPT rely on large amounts of scraped internet data to generate content. Tremblay and Awad highlight that books are a vital component, offering prime examples of high-quality, long-form writing. According to their complaint, OpenAI’s training data reportedly incorporated over 300,000 books, some of which were sourced from shadow libraries providing copyrighted books without authorization.
Notably, the authors assert that ChatGPT can generate highly accurate summaries of their books, bolstering their claim that their works were utilized in the training process without permission.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly misused by OpenAI.
In conclusion, OpenAI finds itself entangled in a legal battle as authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay accuse the company of misusing their copyrighted works to train ChatGPT. While OpenAI and other defendants argue fair use, the lawsuit raises important questions surrounding the use of copyrighted material in training cutting-edge AI systems. The outcome of this case can have significant implications for the future of AI development and intellectual property rights.
