Award-winning authors take legal action against OpenAI

The lawsuit, filed by Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman, says that OpenAI copied their work without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts.

The lawsuit, filed by Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and authors Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman, says that OpenAI copied their work without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts. The lawsuit adds that the authors' works like books, plays and articles play a key role in training ChatGPT as these works are the "best examples of high-quality, long form writing."

The authors argue that their writing was included in ChatGPT's training dataset without their permission, saying that the AI chatbot can summarise their books accurately, and also generate text that copies their style.

In return, the authors are demanding a ban on OpenAI's "unfair business practices" and are seeking "unspecified amount of money damage"

The lawsuit requested an unspecified amount of money damages and an order blocking OpenAI's "unlawful and unfair business practices."

This isn't the first time that a lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI over copyright infringement. In July, comedienne and author Sarah Silverman, and two other authors made headlines for suing ChatGPT creator OpenAI over copyright infringement. Silverman, who authored the book The Bedwetter, argued that ChatGPT summarised the contents of her book when prompted and that she had never given permission to OpenAI to use her book's content to train the chatbot. Writer Christopher Golden, who wrote Ararat, and author Richard Kadrey, who wrote Sandman Slim, also sued the company for using their books' contents without their permission. The trio asked for a jury trial along with monetary damages.

Additionally, in the same month, more than 8,500 authors came together and signed an open letter to tech companies asking them to stop using their books for training AI tools. A report in Techcrunch had revealed that these writers were from different genres like that of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. They argued that generative AI ‘mimics their language, stories, style and ideas’ without their permission and that their work provides the ‘food’ for AI systems to learn for which there has been no ‘bill’ yet.