Authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad have filed a class-action complaint against OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement. The authors claim that OpenAI’s language model, ChatGPT, ingested their books without their permission. Tremblay owns rights to books such as The Cabin at the End of the World, while Awad owns rights to books including 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Bunny. The lawsuit states that ChatGPT generates summaries of the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, which implies that it was trained on their materials. The complaint argues that OpenAI is benefiting commercially from the use of their copyrighted materials. This is the first copyright infringement complaint against OpenAI related to large language models and book training data.
The complaint highlights a June 2018 paper by OpenAI, where the company revealed that its GPT-1 tool was trained on BookCorpus, a collection of over 7,000 unique unpublished books. The complaint explains that large language models, including those developed by OpenAI, Google, and Amazon, have been trained on BookCorpus due to its rich collection of long-form prose.
Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, the attorneys representing the authors, stated that books are ideal for training language models because they contain high-quality, well-edited, long-form prose, making them the gold standard of idea storage. The complaint argues that OpenAI breached its duties by collecting, maintaining, and controlling the authors’ copyrighted works without authorization.
OpenAI is yet to respond to the lawsuit. This case raises questions about the use of copyrighted material in AI training and calls for more transparency and guidelines regarding data usage in the field of AI. Experts suggest that the outcome of this case could set an important precedent for future copyright disputes involving AI models.
It is essential to note that as this is an ongoing legal matter, OpenAI has not yet presented its side of the story or responded to the allegations. The article aims to present a balanced view of the topic and will be updated as more information becomes available.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article does not constitute legal advice.
