Another copyright infringement lawsuit hits OpenAI and Microsoft as two nonfiction book authors sued Microsoft and OpenAI in a complaint alleging that the defendants stole the writers’ copyrighted works to help build its artificial intelligence (AI) system.
The lawsuit, filed on Friday, Jan 5, in Manhattan federal court, comes a week after The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in a similar copyright infringement complaint that alleges the companies used the newspaper’s content to train large language models.
The latest legal action by authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage follows the acknowledgment by defendants, after the Times’ lawsuit, that copyright owners, including the plaintiffs, should be compensated for the use of their work. The Times’ lawsuit is pursuing “billions of dollars” in damages.
As per the legal document, the Basbanes and Gage suit seeks damages of up to $150,000 for each work the defendants infringed.
According to The Times, it sued OpenAI, the AI company stated, “We respect the rights of content creators and owners and are committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models.”
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In September, led by the Authors Guild, a New York-based professional organization for published writers, a group of 17 writers, including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders and Jonathan Franzen, joined a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI.
Another author, Julian Sancton, is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using nonfiction authors’ work without authorization to train AI models, including ChatGPT — a natural language processing artificial intelligence (AI) tool —.
The maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT is also facing a different class-action lawsuit in California over allegedly scraping private user information from the internet. Clarkson Law Firm filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on June 28, 2023.
The suit alleges that OpenAI trained ChatGPT using data collected from millions of social media comments, blog posts, Wikipedia articles and family recipes without the consent of the respective users.
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