2023-09-11 19:33:53
A group of American authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in San Francisco federal court, accusing the Microsoft-backed program of misusing their writings to train its popular chatbot ChatGPT, powered by artificial intelligence.
Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman said in their lawsuit Friday that OpenAI copied their works without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text messages.
Chabon’s representatives referred questions about the lawsuit to the authors’ lawyers. Those attorneys and OpenAI representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.
This lawsuit is at least the third proposed copyright infringement class action filed by authors against OpenAI, supported by Microsoft. Companies including Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Stability AI have also been sued by copyright holders for the use of their work in AI learning.
OpenAI and other companies argued that AI training made fair use of copyrighted material taken from the internet.
ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app 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 says works such as books, plays and articles are particularly valuable to ChatGPT’s training because they are the “best examples of high-quality, long-form writing.”
The authors allege that their writings were included in ChatGPT’s training dataset without their permission, arguing that the system can accurately summarize their works and generate texts that mimic their style.
The lawsuit sought an unspecified amount of damages and an order blocking OpenAI’s “unlawful and unfair business practices.”
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