Several Pulitzer Prize-winning authors have joined a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, the creator of the popular ChatGPT tool, alleging that the tech companies trained artificial intelligence (AI) models without permission. used their copyrighted work to give away.
The lawsuit, originally filed by author Julian Sincton in late November, now includes Kai Bird, Taylor Branch, Stacey Schiff and eight other nonfiction authors as plaintiffs, according to a filing Tuesday. According to the amended complaint.
Byrd co-authored “American Prometheus,” the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that won him the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2006 and was adapted into the hit movie “Oppenheimer” earlier this year.
Branch won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in History for the first of his three-volume series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, while Schiff won the 2000 Prize in Biography for “Vera,” about the wife of famed author Vladimir Nabokov. Won the Pulitzer Prize.
The group of nonfiction authors alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in and closely partnered with OpenAI, used the authors’ work to copy their GPT models without permission. Use for training violates copyright laws.
“OpenAI and Microsoft have created tens of billions of dollars in business by taking the collective work of humanity without permission,” the lawsuit reads. “Instead of paying for intellectual property, they pretend that laws protecting copyright don’t exist.”
“Nonfiction writers often spend time imagining, researching, and writing their creations,” it continues. “While OpenAI and Microsoft refuse to pay non-fiction authors, their AI platform is worth a fortune. The foundation of the OpenAI platform is nothing less than rampant theft of copyrighted works.
The lawsuit is the latest in which big tech companies have been accused of copyright infringement over massive data sets used to train their AI models.
More than a dozen novelists, including “My Sister’s Keeper” author Jodi Picoult and “A Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin, also sued OpenAI in September, while another group of authors sued Facebook. And is suing Instagram’s parent company Meta. for allegedly using his work to train its AI models, Llama 1 and Llama 2.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) and several other religious authors also sued Meta, Microsoft, Bloomberg and the Eleuther AI Institute in October for using a dataset that contained their copyrighted books.
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