As reported by Reuters, two authors have sued OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, for using their works of fiction to train the machine learning that underpins the artificial intelligence of chatbots.
The copyright lawsuit was filed Wednesday in San Francisco federal court on behalf of science fiction and horror author Paul Tremblay and novelist Mona Awad. ChatGPT can provide an overview of its achievements, so it’s no surprise that those achievements were fed into the machine learning models used in his ChatGPT.
The lawsuit seeks class action status, accusing OpenAI of training ChatGPT on the authors’ copyrighted material “without consent, credit or compensation,” according to a copy of the filing uploaded by Reuters. .
According to the filing, their work is a pair of online book datasets referenced in OpenAI’s 2020 paper published to introduce GPT-3, the large-scale language model that powers the ChatGPT chatbot. argue that it is likely that it comes from According to the Bloomberg Law, the authors of the lawsuit allege that these datasets were created by “shadow library” web sites such as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub that use torrent downloads to illegally publish copyrighted works. It claims that it is likely that the material is obtained from the site.
“These grossly illegal shadow libraries have long been of interest to the AI training community,” the filing states.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Other AI Lawsuits and Fights
As soon as AI tools emerged last year, lawsuits began arguing over what they were trained on and how they could be used.
Photo service Getty Images blocked AI-generated images in September, then sued AI art generator Stable Diffusion in February for copying more than 12 million images from its database without permission or compensation.
Separately, three artists were sued in January for allegedly using their work to train AI models without consent or compensation, according to The Verge. , claiming that “millions of artists” have suffered similar damage.
In response, software maker Adobe released Firefly in March. It’s a generative AI toolset that uses the company’s own stock image library to create images without the fear of illegally scraping an artist’s work. Adobe is preparing to integrate his Firefly into other products in its software lineup such as Photoshop.
Creators have encountered another speed bump in integrating AI into the modern publishing process. The U.S. Copyright Office denied copyright protection to AI-generated graphic novel art, but granted copyright protection to human-created text. And short story publications are flooded with AI-generated posts, to the point that prominent media outlet Clarkesworld has banned anything even partially AI-generated.
