Authors’ Lawsuit Alleges OpenAI Violated Copyright Law in ChatGPT Training

Two authors have sued OpenAI, alleging the ChatGPT creator violated copyright law.

Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad said in their lawsuit that the ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) tool generates summaries of their work that are accurate to a degree that is only possible if it were trained on their books, CNBC reported Wednesday (July 5).

The authors further alleged that this training on their copyrighted works was done without their consent, according to the report.

“At no point did ChatGPT reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published work,” their complaint said, per the report.

OpenAI did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

The CNBC report added that the plaintiffs face the challenge of proving that ChatGPT gleaned the information from their books and that they suffered financial damage as a result.

This report comes about a week after a federal lawsuit was filed claiming that OpenAI trained its ChatGPT tool using millions of people’s stolen data.

The suit, which was filed June 28, accuses the multibillion-dollar AI company of carrying out a strategy to “secretly harvest massive amounts of personal data from the internet.”

This data, the suit alleges, included private information and conversations, medical data and information about children, without owners’ knowledge or permission.

On the same day, June 28, it was reported that several news and magazine publishers are considering banding together to combat AI’s use of their content.

Among the publishers’ concerns is how their content has been used to train AI tools and whether they should be compensated; how generative AI tools provide information to users without requiring them to click on links to go directly to the source; and how their content will be combined with that of other publishers and presented by the AI tool to the user, without acknowledgment of the origins of the content, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported June 28.

With the rise of AI, different AI regulatory regimes are emerging across Europe, the United States, China and elsewhere, and will affect companies and their adoption of self-regulatory and compliance-based tools and practices.