Lawsuit says OpenAI violated US authors’ copyrights to train AI chatbot

To train their AI model ChatGPT, OpenAI used copyrighted data from thousands of books, says the two famous U.S. authors while suing OpenAI in court.

Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, the two Massachusetts-based novelists have recently sued OpenAI in a San Francisco federal court. The authors say OpenAI have used the writings from their books without permission to train its generative AI system ChatGPT.

The bestselling authors have filed a proposed class action suit against OpenAI for the alleged copyright infringement and violation of intellectual property. They claimed that the data has been used from almost 300,000 books including the ones that are strictly copyrighted but were sourced through illegal means like shadow libraries.

They also cited that ChatGPT was able to generate very precise summaries of their novels and books which hints that their books must have been a part of ChatGPT’s database.

Mona Awad’s famous books “Bunny”, “13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl” and “All’s Well” have made it to many award nominations and wins. Tremblay’s books “Head Full of Ghosts”, “Cabin at the End of the World” and “Last Conversation” are amongst the highest-rated novels.

The lawsuit proclaims that “a variety of materials had been used to train the large language models, but books have been a key ingredient in training datasets for large language models because books offer the best examples of high-quality long-form writing.”

“Because the OpenAI Language Models cannot function without the expressive information extracted from Plaintiffs’ works (and others) and retained inside them, the OpenAI Language Models are themselves infringing derivative works, made without Plaintiffs’ permission and in violation of their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act.”- The suit.

Even though the representatives from OpenAI haven’t expressed anything concerning the lawsuit. However, the lawsuit targets have claimed that there’s always have been a fair use of any of the copyrighted data used by OpenAI’s systems.

As per the lawsuit, an anonymous amount of money damages have been levied on OpenAI on behalf of all the nationwide entities and individuals whose copyrighted works have been used by the company without any consent.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a revolutionary generative AI model that has changed the course of the tech industry in the past year. Its ability to generate creative and conversational content made it the quickest application to reach 100 million active users worldwide within two months of getting launched.