ChatGPT Lawsuit
SF writer Paul Tremblay and author Mona Awad are the named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Open AI, alleging their ChatGPT, a Large Language Model “AI” chat program, infringed on their copyrights — and those of thousands of other authors. In addition to copyright infringement, the authors allege violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and negligence.
The filing argues that thousands of books were copied into ChatGPT’s training dataset “without consent, credit, or compensation to the authors,” and that ChatGPT’s output is illegal derivative work. The suit says, “When ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works — something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”
The source of training data for ChatGPT isn’t entirely clear. The developers used a data set called BookCorpus, which scraped about 7,000 books from Smashwords without permission, but Open AI has also referred to a larger data set of nearly 300,000 works, possibly sourced from “shadow library” sites that illegally post works under copyright.
The lawsuit was brought in San Francisco Federal Court, filed by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and Matthew Butterick.
For more, see the article in the Guardian, and read the legal filing here.
Update (7/11/23): SF Authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden have joined comedian Sarah Silverman in another class-action suit from the same law firm, this time naming OpenAI and Meta (the parent company of Facebook) as defendants. Meta allegedly used training data including books by the plaintiffs to train its own model, LLaMA. For more, see the article in The Los Angeles Times.
This report and more like it in the July 2023 issue of Locus.
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