A group of 11 nonfiction authors have joined a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court accusing OpenAI and Microsoft MSFT.O of misusing books they wrote to train the models behind OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot and other software based on artificial intelligence.
The writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff and Kai Bird, who co-wrote J. Robert Oppenheimer’s biography “American Prometheus,” which was adapted into the hit film “Oppenheimer” this year, told the court on Tuesday that the companies infringed his copyright by using his work to train OpenAI’s large GPT writing platforms.
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Representatives for OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
“The defendants are raking in billions from the unauthorized use of nonfiction books, and the authors of these books deserve compensation and fair treatment for it,” the writers’ lawyer, Rohit Nath, said Wednesday.
Hollywood Reporter writer and editor Julian Sancton first filed the proposed class-action lawsuit last month. The case is one of several that have been brought by groups of copyright owners, including authors John Grisham, George RR Martin and Jonathan Franzen, against OpenAI and other technology companies for alleged misuse of their work in AI training. .
The companies have denied the allegations.
Sancton’s was the first lawsuit by an author against OpenAI that also named Microsoft as a defendant. The tech giant has invested billions of dollars in the artificial intelligence startup and has integrated OpenAI systems into its products.
The amended complaint filed Monday said OpenAI “removed” the authors’ works along with a large amount of other copyrighted material from the Internet without permission to teach its GPT models how to respond to human text prompts.
The lawsuit also says that Microsoft has been “deeply involved” in the training and development of the models and is also responsible for copyright infringement.
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The authors asked the court for an unspecified amount of damages and an order for the companies to stop infringing their copyright.