Two writers sue OpenAI for violating their copyrights to train ChatGPT

The writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad have filed a lawsuit in a federal court in San Francisco against OpenAI, the technology that developed ChatGPT.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
07 July 2023 Friday 10:28
9 Reads
Two writers sue OpenAI for violating their copyrights to train ChatGPT

The writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad have filed a lawsuit in a federal court in San Francisco against OpenAI, the technology that developed ChatGPT. In their writing, the authors allege that the company misused their works to "train" its popular generative artificial intelligence system.

Tremblay and Awad say that ChatGPT, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that is successful around the world and that has partnered with the giant Microsoft to apply its technology, extracted data copied from thousands of books without permission, including theirs, thus violating the copyright of the authors.

According to his estimates, OpenAI was fed more than three hundred thousand books, including from illegal "shadow libraries" that offer copyrighted books without permission, such as Z-Library or Lib-Gen. Tremblay and Awad say that ChatGPT was able to generate "very accurate" summaries of their books, indicating that they had been used for training.

ChatGPT and other generative AI systems create content using vast amounts of data pulled from the Internet. The chatbot starts from books, paintings or works by artists for which it has not paid royalties.

This is the second demand that OpenAI has received in a week. The other is a class action lawsuit accusing ChatGPT and Dall-e of violating the privacy and copyright of millions of internet users.