OpenAI faces multiple lawsuits from authors over copyright infringement

A group of authors, including Sarah Silverman, have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying their works to train an artificial intelligence system that will "replace the very writings it copied"1. The authors claim that OpenAI violated US law by copying their works without permission or compensation, and that the company's chatbots can now produce "derivative works" that can mimic and summarize the authors' books, potentially harming the market for authors' work23. The plaintiffs hope to get the filing classified as a class action2.

The Authors Guild and 17 well-known authors, including George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and John Grisham, have also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York, alleging that the company "copied plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration" and fed the copyrighted materials into large language models23. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI's LLMs endanger fiction writers' ability to make a living, as the LLMs allow anyone to generate text that they would otherwise pay writers to create2.

OpenAI has argued that the authors' copyrights were not violated and that a chunk of the case should be thrown out1. However, the authors have rejected this argument, calling OpenAI's response "wildly off the mark"1. The legal action is at least the third against OpenAI over the company using copyrighted books to train its system5.

Key facts:

• A group of authors, including Sarah Silverman, have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement1.
• The Authors Guild and 17 well-known authors, including George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and John Grisham, have also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI23.
• The authors claim that OpenAI copied their works without permission or compensation and fed the copyrighted materials into large language models23.
• OpenAI has argued that the authors' copyrights were not violated and that a chunk of the case should be thrown out1.
• The legal action is at least the third against OpenAI over the company using copyrighted books to train its system5.CopilotNot AccurateView SourcesCopy To ClipboardEdit Query