Thousands of nonfiction authors are part of a new class-action lawsuit that alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft trained ChatGPT and other AI products on their copyrighted works.
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A new class action lawsuit was filed Tuesday against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies trained the AI chatbot ChatGPT and its later versions on copyrighted materials from works of nonfiction and academic journals without their consent.
The lawsuit comes as OpenAI is in turmoil, with the abrupt ousting of its former CEO Sam Altman and some 750 employees threatening to leave the company if Altman is not reinstated. The company’s investors are also considering suing OpenAI’s board over events at the AI giant, according to a report. Reuters report.
The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit is Julian Sancton, the New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth: Belgica’s Journey to Dark Antarctica. Sancton spent five years and tens of thousands of dollars traveling around the world to complete research for the book, the lawsuit says. In response to a prompt, ChatGPT confirmed that Sancton’s book was part of the dataset used to train the chatbot, according to the lawsuit filed by law firm Susman Godfrey LLP.
Sancton and thousands of other writers did not consent to or be compensated for the use of their intellectual property in training the AI, the lawsuit notes. Their complaint also highlights that Microsoft and OpenAI have commercialized their AI models, generating billions of dollars in revenue through products like BingChat and ChatGPT Enterprise.
“Nonfiction authors often spend years designing, researching, and writing their creations. While OpenAI and Microsoft refuse to pay nonfiction authors, their AI platform is worth a fortune. The basis of the OpenAI platform is nothing less than the widespread theft of copyrighted works,” the lawsuit states.
This is another copyright-related lawsuit that OpenAI and Microsoft are currently facing. In September, famous literary figures like screenwriter Michael Chabon, journalist Rachel Louise Synder, fiction writer Matthew Klam and others filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement. Over the past year, the company has also been sued by artists and creators for ingesting their works to train various AI systems to generate new types of content. However, this lawsuit is different from others in that it is the first ChatGPT-related class action lawsuit that names Microsoft as a defendant.
“Defendants’ models were calibrated (or ‘trained’) by reproducing a massive corpus of copyrighted materials, including tens or hundreds of thousands of nonfiction books,” the lawsuit states.
In response to similar copyright allegations, OpenAI stated that content generated by ChatGPT does not constitute a “derivative work” and therefore does not constitute copyright infringement. Microsoft did not immediately respond to Forbes’ request for comment and OpenAI declined to comment on pending litigation.