OpenAI is hit with lawsuit after lawsuit. The company just had its lawsuit regarding privacy concerns dismissed, and it already faced more legal actions prior. The latest lawsuit once again accuses OpenAI of copyright infringement, with prominent authors as the plaintiffs.
Another Day, Another Lawsuit
AI companies require lots of data to train their AI large language models (LLM). However, the issue does not lie with how much content they need but where they get it from. A lot of individuals have come forward claiming that OpenAI used their copyrighted works without permission.
The latest lawsuit that the AI giant is facing comes from well-known authors with work you might recognize. The plaintiffs include The Authors Guild as well as 17 other authors including George R.R. Martin known for "Game of Thrones," Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, and Jodi Picoult.
OpenAI has been accused of using the mentioned authors's copyrighted materials "without permission or consideration," which are then used to train the company's LLMs, as reported by The Verge. The group aims to turn the lawsuit into a class action suit.
The complaint states that the authors' livelihood "derive from the works they create" but OpenAI's LLMs "endanger fiction writers' ability to make a living in that the LLMs allow anyone to generate," given that they can do it for free or a much cheaper price.
Adding to the complaint, the authors also expressed that the trained chatbot could generate derivative work that will be based on, mimic, summarize, or paraphrase their books. This in turn could affect the market negatively for the authors.
The plaintiffs suggested that the AI model could train using content from the public domain, instead of using the copyrighted materials they or other writers created without paying a licensing fee. Sadly, this had been the case for other AI companies as well.
Accusations of Data Scraping
The ChatGPT maker has been allegedly stealing people's data from the internet to train its AI models. The class action suit filed back in late June claims that OpenAI takes personal data, including "essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could take."
In the 160-page complaint, it stated that the AI company seized the data without notice, consent, or compensation, and has done so on an "unprecedented scale." Even Microsoft was pulled into the lawsuit as a defendant, as reported by CNN.
A partner at the Clarkson law firm, Timothy K. Giordano says that by "collecting previously obscure personal data of millions and misappropriating it to develop a volatile, untested technology, OpenAI put everyone in a zone of risk."
As for how far "unprecedented" is, the lawsuit states that OpenAI products use "stolen private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge."
This has been an ongoing issue in different fields, not just written content. A lot of artists have also come forward stating that AI companies are using their artwork to train AI image generators, even though the works are under copyright protection.
