Nonfiction writers file infringement lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI

A lawsuit has been filed by a group of nonfiction writers against artificial intelligence (AI) startup OpenAI and tech behemoth Microsoft, claiming that the two companies trained their ChatGPT tool to replicate their works without the authors’ permission. 

 

Author Julian Sancton, the primary plaintiff in the case, claimed in a complaint submitted to a federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday that he and thousands of other nonfiction writers were not paid for work that AI had copied. 

The complaint mentioned that Microsoft and OpenAI made billions of dollars from their AI products, profiting financially from the commercialization of their work. 

Nonfiction writers frequently dedicate years to planning, investigating, and penning their works. The lawsuit claims that “OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI platform is worth a fortune, but they refuse to pay nonfiction writers.” “The widespread theft of works protected by copyright is the foundation of the OpenAI platform.” 

Additionally, the complaint claims that both businesses worked closely together to develop and implement their AI-powered products, like the well-known ChatGPT chatbot, which can recognize and process user input and “generate text that has been calibrated to mimic a human written response.” 

According to the lawsuit, “Defendants have made commercial reproductions of millions, if not billions, of copyrighted works without any license, without permission, or payment to authors.” “By doing this, they have violated Plaintiff Sancton’s exclusive rights as well as those of other writers and rightsholders whose works have been appropriated and copied for the purpose of training their artificial intelligence models.”

 

The lawsuits coincide with a recent upheaval between the two tech companies, as OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, rejoined the company a few days after being removed following an internal investigation by the board. 

More than 600 workers at OpenAI signed an open letter following Altman’s dismissal from the company, threatening to work for Microsoft alongside him if the current board of directors didn’t resign. 

The well-known ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that automatically produces responses to users’ inquiries that are more sophisticated than those produced by earlier technologies, was introduced by OpenAI in November of last year. 

 

Other significant tech firms, like Microsoft, introduced or announced their own AI-implemented services this year as a result of the success of OpenAI’s chatbot.

 

The two businesses are being sued by Sancton on behalf of the group of nonfiction writers “for their large-scale infringement of their copyrighted works, as well as injunctive relief.”