Pulitzer Prize winner among authors suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI for copyright infringement
Amongst the authors suing ChatGPT is Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon.
By Reuters
Published on 12/09/2023 – 06:30•Updated 10:21
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OpenAI has previously argued that copyrighted material scraped from the Internet to train its AI chatbot ChatGPT is fair use of content.
A group of authors in the United States, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, has sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, accusing the Microsoft-backed program of misusing their writing to train its popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPT.
Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman said in their lawsuit on Friday that OpenAI copied their works without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts.
Chabon’s representatives referred queries about the lawsuit to the writers’ lawyers.
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The lawyers and representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests from Reuters for comment on Monday.
The lawsuit is at least the third proposed copyright-infringement class action filed by authors against Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Companies, including Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Stability AI, have also been sued by copyright owners over the use of their work in AI training.
‘Best examples of quality writing’
OpenAI and other companies have argued that AI training makes fair use of copyrighted material scraped from the internet.
ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, before being supplanted by Meta’s Threads app.
The new San Francisco lawsuit said that works like books, plays and articles are particularly valuable for ChatGPT’s training as the “best examples of high-quality, long form writing”.
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The authors alleged that their writing was included in ChatGPT’s training dataset without their permission, arguing that the system can accurately summarise their works and generate text that mimics their styles.
The lawsuit requested an unspecified amount of money damages and an order blocking OpenAI’s “unlawful and unfair business practices”.
