Prominent Authors Sue OpenAI for Unlawful Training of Chatbot on Their Work
September 20, 2023
A group representing U.S. authors has filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI in Manhattan federal court. The Authors Guild, along with renowned writers such as John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult, and George R.R. Martin, accuses OpenAI of unlawfully training its popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, on their literary works.
This lawsuit adds to a series of legal actions taken by writers, source-code owners, and visual artists against generative AI providers. In addition to OpenAI, similar lawsuits are pending against Meta Platforms and Stability AI over the use of data to train their AI systems.
Other authors involved in the recent lawsuit include Michael Connelly, known for “The Lincoln Lawyer,” as well as lawyer-novelists David Baldacci and Scott Turow.
OpenAI and other defendants in the AI industry argue that their use of training data scraped from the internet falls under fair use as established by U.S. copyright law.
Responding to the lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson stated that the company respects authors’ rights and is engaged in constructive discussions with creators worldwide, including the Authors Guild.
Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, emphasized the importance of authors maintaining control over the use of their works by generative AI. She believes this control is necessary to preserve literary creations.
According to the lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild, the datasets used to train OpenAI’s large language model included copyrighted text from the authors’ books. The complaint alleges that this text may have been sourced from illegal online repositories of “pirate” books.
The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT produced accurate summaries of the authors’ books, indicating that their copyrighted text is included in the AI system’s database.
Another concern cited in the lawsuit is the potential for systems like ChatGPT to replace human authors and generate low-quality ebooks that impersonate established writers, thereby displacing genuine human-authored books.
This legal action highlights the ongoing debate surrounding the use of AI in creative industries and the need to balance innovation with protection of intellectual property rights.
Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by David Bario, Daniel Wallis, and Sonali Paul