OpenAI, the renowned artificial intelligence (AI) company, is facing a lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement. Two American authors have sued OpenAI in a proposed class action, claiming that the company improperly used their books to train its popular generative AI system, ChatGPT.
The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in San Francisco, accuses OpenAI of unlawfully extracting data from thousands of books authored by Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad without obtaining proper permission. According to the authors, this action amounts to copyright infringement.
The authors’ attorney, Matthew Butterick, refrained from commenting on the ongoing lawsuit, while representatives from OpenAI, a private company supported by Microsoft Corp, have yet to respond to the allegations.
This legal challenge is not the first of its kind in the AI industry. Various lawsuits have been filed against companies like OpenAI and Microsoft’s GitHub, as well as Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, by individuals claiming their copyrighted material was used without authorization. However, the defendants in these cases have argued that their AI systems make fair use of the copyrighted works.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular AI system, generates responses to users’ text prompts using a conversational approach. Since its launch earlier this year, it has garnered immense popularity, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history and amassing 100 million active users within just two months.
To create content, ChatGPT and similar generative AI systems rely on large amounts of data scraped from the internet. The lawsuit filed by Tremblay and Awad argues that books are a vital component in this process because they offer the best examples of high-quality longform writing.
According to the authors’ complaint, OpenAI’s training data includes over 300,000 books, some of which are sourced from illicit shadow libraries that distribute copyrighted books without authorization.
Both Mona Awad, known for her novels 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Bunny, and Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World, which was adapted into the film Knock at the Cabin, claim that ChatGPT can generate remarkably accurate summaries of their works, indicating that their books are present in OpenAI’s database.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for copyright owners across the nation whose works were allegedly misused by OpenAI.
OpenAI’s foray into the legal landscape highlights the challenges surrounding the use of copyrighted material in training cutting-edge AI systems. As the lawsuit unfolds, it will provide insight into the evolving legal framework governing AI technology and the boundaries of fair use in this context.
