The Authors Guild, along with 17 celebrated authors such as Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, have initiated a lawsuit against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs aim to have the lawsuit recognized as a class action.
According to the complaint, OpenAI is accused of “wholesale copying of plaintiffs’ works without permission or compensation” for the purpose of training large language models (LLMs).
The lawsuit contends that OpenAI’s actions could jeopardize the livelihoods of fiction authors by enabling the automatic and cost-effective generation of text that would otherwise be created by writers for a fee.
The authors further express concerns that OpenAI’s LLMs could lead to derivative works that imitate, summarize, or paraphrase their books, potentially impacting their market.
The complaint points out that OpenAI had the option to train its models on public domain works instead of incorporating copyrighted materials without securing licensing fees.
MegalorPreneur Magazine has reached out to OpenAI for their response to the lawsuit.
This lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal actions against OpenAI by well-known authors. Previously, authors like Michael Chabon, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, Richard Kadrey, Paul Tremblay, and Mona Awad have filed complaints alleging copyright infringement due to the use of their works in training AI models.
Generative AI companies have faced copyright-related challenges in the past, with lawsuits also emerging in the realm of AI-generated images. Microsoft, a partner of OpenAI, has pledged to shoulder legal responsibilities in the event that commercial users of its Copilot AI service face legal actions.