In a landmark development, a consortium of distinguished authors, including Pulitzer Prize laureates Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff, and Kai Bird, has rallied behind a legal pursuit in Manhattan federal court. The legal action accuses tech behemoths OpenAI and Microsoft of wrongfully exploiting the intellectual property embedded within the authors’ works to train advanced language models, including the famed ChatGPT.
This coalition, spearheaded by acclaimed writer Julian Sancton, initiates a class-action lawsuit asserting that OpenAI and Microsoft, in their pursuit of artificial intelligence excellence, have unlawfully utilized the authors’ written masterpieces. The complaint alleges a systematic infringement of copyrights, contending that the tech giants have reaped immense financial gains from the unauthorized incorporation of nonfiction books into the training datasets of OpenAI’s GPT models.
As of now, spokespersons for both OpenAI and Microsoft have refrained from providing immediate responses to the allegations, leaving the literary community and legal experts alike awaiting their formal statements.
“The defendants are amassing vast profits through the unapproved utilization of nonfiction literary works. The deserving authors behind these creations seek not just compensation but also equitable treatment,” articulated Rohit Nath, the attorney representing the coalition of writers.
Noteworthy is the inclusion of Microsoft as a defendant in the lawsuit, marking a significant escalation in legal actions against OpenAI. The tech titan, having invested substantial financial resources in the artificial intelligence startup, now finds itself entangled in a legal discourse concerning the alleged misuse of copyrighted materials.
The amended complaint, filed recently, asserts that OpenAI engaged in “scraping” content from the authors’ works and other copyrighted sources on the internet without proper authorization. Furthermore, it claims that Microsoft played a pivotal role in the training and development of these AI models, thereby sharing liability for the purported copyright infringement.
In their plea before the court, the authors seek unspecified monetary damages and a restraining order to prevent any further infringement upon their copyrights by the accused companies.
This legal entanglement adds a new layer of complexity to the ongoing debate about the ethical and legal dimensions of employing copyrighted content in the training of artificial intelligence models. As the legal proceedings unfold, the literary world watches closely, poised at the intersection of technology and intellectual property rights.
