Pulitzer-winning authors join OpenAI, Microsoft copyright lawsuit
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The writers told the court that the companies infringed their copyrights by using their work to train OpenAI’s GPT large language models.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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NEW YORK – A group of 11 non-fiction authors have joined a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court that accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of misusing books the authors have written to train the models behind OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence-based software.
The writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff and Kai Bird – who co-wrote the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus (2005), which was adapted into the hit film Oppenheimer in 2023 – told the court on Dec 19 that the companies infringed their copyrights by using their work to train OpenAI’s GPT large language models.
Representatives for OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Dec 20.
“The defendants are raking in billions from their unauthorised use of non-fiction books, and the authors of these books deserve fair compensation and treatment for it,” the writers’ attorney Rohit Nath said on Dec 20.
Writer and Hollywood Reporter editor Julian Sancton first filed the proposed class-action lawsuit in November.
The case is one of several that have been brought by groups of copyright owners
The companies have denied the allegations.
Sancton’s was the first author lawsuit against OpenAI to also name Microsoft as a defendant. The tech giant has invested billions of dollars in the AI start-up and integrated OpenAI’s systems into its products.
The amended complaint filed on Dec 18 said OpenAI “scraped” the authors’ works along with reams of other copyrighted material from the Internet without permission to teach its GPT models how to respond to human text prompts.
The lawsuit also said that Microsoft has been “deeply involved” in training and developing the models and is also liable for copyright infringement.
The authors asked the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order for the companies to stop infringing their copyrights. REUTERS
