Pulitzer Prize Winner and Other Authors Accuse OpenAI of Misusing Their Writing

On Friday, a group of US authors including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon filed a lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco, accusing the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence program OpenAI of misusing their writing to train its popular AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT.

In the lawsuit, novelist Chabon and playwright David Henry Hwang, along with authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman, claimed OpenAI improperly copied their works in order to teach ChatGPT how to respond to human text prompts.

The authors’ representative stated, “All queries should be referred to the writers’ lawyers.”

This marks the third copyright-infringement class-action lawsuit filed against OpenAI by authors. Not only authors, but companies such as Microsoft (MSFT. O), Meta Platforms (META. O) and Stability AI have also been sued over the unauthorized use of their content in AI training.

Related: FTC Investigating OpenAI Over Data Security

OpenAI and other companies argued that AI training needs copyrighted material that is scraped from the internet. The lawsuit mentioned that the writers’ works were especially valuable for ChatGPT’s learning to “summarize their writing and generate text that mimics their styles.”

The suit requested for an unspecified amount of money damages and asked for an order to block OpenAI’s “unlawful and unfair business practices.”

When asked for comment, lawyers and representatives of OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday. The court has yet to hear both sides of the argument and a decision on the case has yet to be made.

Source: Reuters