Esteemed Authors File Lawsuit Against OpenAI for Copyright Infringement
A group of renowned American authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, have taken legal action against OpenAI. The authors have accused the organization of copyright infringement, alleging that their works were used without permission to train OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The Authors Guild, acting on behalf of the plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit in the federal court of Manhattan on Tuesday. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI replicated the plaintiffs’ works without seeking authorization or providing any form of compensation. The copyrighted materials were then utilized in OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) – algorithms designed to generate text responses resembling human language when prompted by users.
This class-action lawsuit is part of a growing trend of legal proceedings targeting companies responsible for popular generative artificial intelligence tools, such as large language models and image-generation models. Just last month, two authors filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging unauthorized use of their books to train the company’s chatbot.
Other notable cases include Getty Images’ lawsuit against Stability AI, accusing the company of unlawfully copying millions of Getty’s images for training a viral text-to-image generator. Furthermore, a class-action lawsuit involving Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt is underway, with copyright infringement claims relating to their AI image generators.
In a separate class-action lawsuit filed in November, Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI were accused of scraping licensed code for training their code generators. Numerous other lawsuits concerning generative AI are currently in progress.
The Authors Guild argues in its filing that these algorithms form the foundation of the defendants’ extensive commercial operations, and within them resides a systematic and widespread act of theft.
While OpenAI has yet to respond to the lawsuit, these legal actions highlight the ongoing tensions and complex legal questions surrounding the use of copyrighted material to train AI models. As the development of artificial intelligence continues to advance, debates surrounding intellectual property rights and fair compensation for creators are expected to intensify.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency.
