Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay Sue OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement
Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company used their novels without consent to train its artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT. The suit
Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company used their novels without consent to train its artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT. The suit
Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay Sue OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement
Bestselling authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company used their copyrighted novels to train its artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT. The authors allege that their novels, “The Cabin at the End of the World” and “Bunny” and “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” were ingested by ChatGPT without their consent. ChatGPT is powered by large language models that extract massive amounts of text to generate natural responses to user prompts.
The lawsuit raises questions about the use of copyrighted material by OpenAI in training its generative chatbots. The suit claims that OpenAI has used copyrighted works, including books written by Awad and Tremblay, without obtaining consent or providing credit or compensation. Books are considered valuable examples of high-quality writing and have been an essential part of training datasets for large language models.
OpenAI’s training methods have come under scrutiny in the lawsuit. In 2018, the company disclosed that it had trained GPT-1 using a dataset called BookCorpus, which included over 7,000 unpublished books from various genres. The complaint states that these books were copied from Smashwords.com, a website hosting unpublished novels under copyright. Later iterations of OpenAI’s language models were trained using even larger quantities of copyright-protected books.
The creators of ChatGPT and IBM’s privacy chief are calling for increased regulation of AI technologies due to ethical, legal, and national security concerns. This call comes in light of the allegations made in the lawsuit against OpenAI regarding the unauthorized use of copyrighted material from authors like Awad and Tremblay.
In addition to Awad and Tremblay’s lawsuit, a broader class-action suit has been filed by Clarkson, a public-interest law firm representing anonymous clients. This suit accuses OpenAI of extracting private and sometimes identifying information from internet users without their informed consent or knowledge. The growing capabilities of AI to generate new content using web information are expected to lead to more lawsuits in the future.
As the legal battle unfolds, it is evident that the use of copyrighted material by AI systems raises significant concerns. Authors like Awad and Tremblay argue that their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act have been violated by OpenAI’s use of their works without permission. The outcome of this lawsuit could have implications for how AI technologies are regulated and how intellectual property rights are protected in the digital age.
