OpenAI would have violated copyright to train ChatGPT, says lawsuit – 06/29/2023 – Tech

Two US writers sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday, alleging in a class-action lawsuit that the company misused their work to train its popular ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence (AI) system.

Writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad said ChatGPT extracted data copied from thousands of books without permission, infringing on the authors’ copyrights.

Matthew Butterick, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, declined to comment. Representatives for OpenAI, a privately held company backed by Microsoft, had no immediate comment.

Several legal challenges have been filed regarding materials used to train cutting-edge AI systems. Plaintiffs include source code owners against OpenAI and Microsoft’s GitHub, as well as visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt.

The targets of the lawsuit have argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted works.

ChatGPT responds to users’ text requests in a conversational way. The chatbot became the fastest growing consumer app in history earlier this year, 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 extracted from the internet. Tremblay and Awad’s lawsuit claims that books are a “core ingredient” because they offer the “best examples of high-quality, long-form writing.”

The complaint estimates that OpenAI’s training data incorporated more than 300,000 books, including from illegal libraries that offer copyrighted books without permission.

Awad is known for novels such as “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl” and “Bunny”. Tremblay’s novels include “The Cottage at World’s End,” which was adapted into the M. Night Shyamalan film “Knock on the Door,” released in February.

Tremblay and Awad said ChatGPT can 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 national class of copyright holders whose works were allegedly misused by OpenAI.