More writers sue Chat GPT
September 20, 2023
A group of novelists, including John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen, are joining the suit filed by the US Authors Guild against OpenAI over its chatbot technology.
They accuse the company, backed Microsoft, of infringing on their copyrights by using their books to train its popular ChatGPT chatbot. They say that OpenAI’s chatbots can now produce “derivative works” that can mimic and summarise the authors’ works potentially harming the market their work, and that the writers were neither compensated nor asked permission by the company.
Filed in the Southern District of New York, the suit says that while OpenAI does not publicly declare which works it uses to train its models, the company has admitted to using copyrighted material. The complaint also said that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is capable of producing summaries of books that include details not available in reviews or elsewhere online, which suggests the underlying program was fed the books in their entirety.
Novelists from a range of genres including David Baldacci, Jodi Picoult, George RR Martin, George Saunders and Michael Connelly have joinend the complaint, reports NYT.
In other cases, lawyers for OpenAI argued that using texts “for innovations,” including training AI, constitutes fair use.