Eleven nonfiction writers have filed a complaint in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that Microsoft and OpenAI have misused books the writers have written to train the models behind ChatGPT, the company’s well-known chatbot, and other artificial intelligence-based technologies.
The authors, who co-wrote the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus,” which was made into the popular movie “Oppenheimer” this year, along with Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff, and Kai Bird, testified in court on Tuesday that the companies had violated their copyrights by using their work to train OpenAI’s GPT large language models.
Julian Sancton, an editor at the Hollywood Reporter and writer, initially filed the proposed class-action lawsuit last month.
Authors John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jonathan Franzen are among the groups of copyright owners who have filed many lawsuits against OpenAI and other tech companies for allegedly misusing their works for AI training.
The first author lawsuit against OpenAI to include Microsoft as a defendant was Sancton’s. The IT company has integrated OpenAI’s technology into its products and invested billions of dollars in the business that specializes in artificial intelligence.
According to the updated complaint, which was submitted on Monday, OpenAI “scraped” the writers’ works and a ton of other copyrighted content from the internet without their consent in order to train its GPT models to react to text commands from people.
Additionally, according to the lawsuit, Microsoft is accountable for copyright infringement as it was “deeply involved” in the models’ development and training.
The writers requested an order for the firms to cease violating their copyrights and an undisclosed sum of money in damages from the court.
