In this illustration from February 21, 2023, a keyboard is placed in front of a displayed OpenAI logo. Portal/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Acquire License Rights
Sept 20 (Portal) – A trade group for U.S. authors has sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on behalf of prominent writers including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin Company alleges that the company improperly trained its popular artificial intelligence-based chatbot ChatGPT to do their work.
The proposed class action lawsuit, filed late Tuesday by the Authors Guild, joins several other lawsuits filed by authors, source code owners and visual artists against generative AI providers. In addition to Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI, similar lawsuits are pending against Meta Platforms and Stability AI over the data used to train their AI systems.
Other authors involved in the latest lawsuit include “The Lincoln Lawyer” author Michael Connelly and legal novelists David Baldacci and Scott Turow.
OpenAI and other AI defendants have said their use of training data crawled from the Internet qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law.
An OpenAI spokesperson said Wednesday that the company respects authors’ rights and is “having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild.”
Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, said in a statement Wednesday that authors “must have the ability to control whether and how their works are used by generative AI” to “preserve our literature.”
The Authors Guild’s lawsuit alleges that the datasets used to train OpenAI’s large language model to respond to human prompts included text from the authors’ books that may have been sourced from illegal online “pirate” books. Repositories came from.
The complaint states that ChatGPT produced accurate summaries of authors’ books upon request, indicating that their texts were included in the database.
There have also been growing concerns that authors could be replaced by systems like ChatGPT that “generate low-quality e-books, impersonate authors, and displace human-authored books.”
Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Edited by David Bario, Daniel Wallis and Sonali Paul
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