Prominent US authors sue OpenAI over copyrights: Know more

A group of well-known U.S. authors has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of training its popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPT on their work.

According to a report by CNBC, a group of prominent U.S. authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, has sued OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement in utilising their work to train ChatGPT.

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In the lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, the Authors Guild claimed that OpenAI “copied Plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration … then fed Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works into their ‘large language models’ or ‘LLMs,’ algorithms designed to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries.”

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This lawsuit is one of several recent legal actions that have been taken against companies that develop popular generative artificial intelligence tools, such as large language models and image-generation models.

For instance, in July, OpenAI faced a lawsuit where two authors claimed their books were used without consent to train the company’s chatbot.

Getty Images also sued Stability AI in February, accusing the company of copying 12 million Getty images for training data in a viral text-to-image generator.

In January, Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt were collectively hit with a class-action lawsuit related to copyright claims in their AI image generators. 

Furthermore, Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are involved in a proposed class-action lawsuit filed in November, alleging that these companies scraped licensed code to train their code generators. These cases represent just a few examples of ongoing generative AI-related lawsuits.

“These algorithms are at the heart of Defendants’ massive commercial enterprise,” the Authors Guild’s filing mentioned. “And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale.”