This is the latest in a series of lawsuits against OpenAI from popular authors for similar reasons. Other generative AI companies have also faced copyright infringement lawsuits. Microsoft, a partner of OpenAI, has stated it will handle any legal issues if commercial users of its Copilot AI service are sued.
Key takeaways:
- OpenAI is being sued by The Authors Guild and 17 well-known authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, for copyright infringement. They claim OpenAI used their books to train AI models without permission.
- The plaintiffs argue that OpenAI's language learning models (LLMs) could generate text that mimics, summarizes, or paraphrases their books, potentially harming their market and livelihoods.
- The authors suggest that OpenAI could have used works in the public domain for training their AI, instead of using copyrighted material without paying a licensing fee.
- This is not the first lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement. Other authors, including Michael Chabon, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, Richard Kadrey, Paul Tremblay, and Mona Awad, have previously filed similar complaints.