The Winner Of The Pulitzer Lawsuit OpenAI For The Use Of Unlicensed Text In ChatGPT Training

A group of writers in the United States, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, has sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco. They accused the Microsoft-backed program of using their writing incorrectly in popular artificial intelligence chatbot training, ChatGPT.

Chabon, drama writer David Henry Hwang, as well as author Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder, and Ayelet Waldman said in their lawsuit on Friday September 8 that OpenAI copied their work without permission to teach ChatGPT in response to a request for human text.

Vice Chabon referred the question of the lawsuit to the author's lawyers. The lawyers and OpenAI representatives did not immediately respond to a request for media comment on Monday, September 11.

This is the third time a copyright infringement filed by the authors against Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Companies, including Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and AI Stabilities, have also been sued by copyright owners for their work use in artificial intelligence training.

OpenAI and other companies argue that artificial intelligence training has used fair copyrighted material taken from the internet.

ChatGPT became the fastest growing consumer app in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January, before being replaced by Meta app Threads.

The new lawsuit in San Francisco says that works such as books, dramas and articles are invaluable for ChatGPT training as "the best example of high quality, long quality writing."

The authors claim that their writing is included in the ChatGPT training dataset without their permission, arguing that the system can accurately summarize their works and produce text that mimics their writing style.

Reuters reported that the lawsuit was seeking unspecified compensation and an order to stop "unlawful and unfair business practices" OpenAI.