Pulitzer Winner Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Use of Their Work in AI Development

Pulitzerian Prize winners Schiff, Open AI and Microsoft sued (photo: x @REV250BOS)

JAKARTA - A group of 11 nonfiction authors has joined a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of using books they wrote to train the models behind OpenAI's popular chatbot, ChatGPT, and other artificial intelligence-based software.

Writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff, and Kai Bird. They co-wrote the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography "American Prometheus" which was adapted into this year's hit film "Oppenheimer." They told the court on Tuesday December 19 that the companies violated their copyright by using their work to train OpenAI's GPT large language model.

Representatives from OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday, December 20.

"The defendants collected billions from their unauthorized use of nonfiction books, and the authors of these books deserve compensation and fair treatment for it," said the authors' lawyer, Rohit Nath, on Wednesday, December 20.

Hollywood Reporter writer and editor Julian Sancton first filed the class-action lawsuit last month. The case is one of several brought by copyright owner groups including authors such as John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jonathan Franzen against OpenAI and other technology companies for alleged misuse of their work in artificial intelligence training. However, the companies denied these accusations.

Sancton's lawsuit is the first author's lawsuit against OpenAI that also names Microsoft as a defendant. The technology company has invested billions of dollars in artificial intelligence startups and integrated the OpenAI system into its products.

An amendment to the lawsuit filed Monday alleges that OpenAI "grabbed" the authors' works along with a large amount of other copyrighted material from the internet without permission to teach its GPT model how to respond to human text commands.

The lawsuit also states that Microsoft has been "deeply involved" in the training and development of the model and is also liable for copyright infringement.

The authors asked the court to award an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order for the companies to stop violating their copyrights.