Two authors from the United States have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against OpenAI in the federal court in San Francisco. Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, who are based in Massachusetts, claim that OpenAI used their works without permission to train its popular generative AI system, ChatGPT. The authors allege that ChatGPT extracted data from thousands of books, infringing upon their copyrights. Matthew Butterick, the attorney representing the authors, declined to provide further comments, while OpenAI, a privately held company supported by Microsoft, has not yet responded to the request for comment.
This lawsuit is part of a series of legal challenges related to the use of copyrighted material in training advanced AI systems. Other cases involve source-code owners suing OpenAI and Microsoft’s GitHub, as well as visual artists suing Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. The defendants in these lawsuits have argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted content.
ChatGPT is an AI system that generates responses to users’ text prompts in a conversational manner. It quickly gained popularity and became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, with 100 million active users just two months after its launch earlier this year. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT rely on vast amounts of scraped data from the internet to create content.
Tremblay and Awad’s lawsuit emphasizes the importance of books as a “key ingredient” in training AI systems, as they provide excellent examples of high-quality longform writing. The complaint estimates that OpenAI’s training data includes over 300,000 books, some of which may have been sourced from illegal “shadow libraries” that offer copyrighted books without authorization.
Mona Awad is known for her novels, including “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl” and “Bunny.” Paul Tremblay’s notable works include “The Cabin at the End of the World,” which was adapted into the film “Knock at the Cabin” by M. Night Shyamalan, released in February.
In their lawsuit, Tremblay and Awad highlight that ChatGPT is capable of generating “very accurate” summaries of their books, indicating that their works were used in its database. The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified monetary damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works were allegedly misused by OpenAI.
