OpenAI And Microsoft Sued For Use Of Non-fictive Writer's Work To Train AI Models

OpenAI was sued by the authors of non-fiction works (Photo: dock. pexels)

JAKARTA - OpenAI and Microsoft were sued on Tuesday, November 21 over claims that they abused the work of non-fiction writers to train an artificial intelligence (AI) model that underlies services such as chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAI.

"OpenAI copied tens of thousands of non-fiction books without permission to teach its big language model to respond to human text instructions," said Hollywood Reporter author and editor Julian Sancton, who led a class action lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court.

The lawsuit is one of several that have been filed by the copyright-owning group, including authors John Grisham, George RR Martin and Jonathan Franzen, against OpenAI and other tech companies over alleged abuse of their work to train the AI system. The company has denied the allegations.

Sancton's complaint was the first author's lawsuit against OpenAI which also named Microsoft as the defendant. The company has invested billions of dollars in artificial intelligence startups and integrated the OpenAI system into its products.

An OpenAI spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday's lawsuit, citing pending legal proceedings. Representatives and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"While OpenAI and Microsoft refuse to pay non-fiction writers, their AI platform is worth a lot of money," Sancton attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement. "The basis of OpenAI is nothing but massive theft of copyrighted work."

Sancton's lawsuit says that OpenAI copies his non-fiction books, including "Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgium's Journey into the Dark Space Night" to train its big GPT language model.

The complaint also said that Microsoft had been "deeply involved" in model training and development and was also responsible for copyright infringement.

Sancton asked the court to compensate an unspecified amount of money and a court order to block the alleged violation.