A group of US writers, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, sued OpenAI in San Francisco federal court, accusing the Microsoft-backed project of misusing their work to train its popular AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT. Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang and writers Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman said in Friday’s lawsuit that OpenAI copied their work without permission to teach ChatGPT to respond to human text prompts.
Chabon’s representatives referred questions about the lawsuit to the screenwriter’s attorneys. The lawyers and representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday. The lawsuit is at least the third copyright infringement class action lawsuit filed by the author against Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Companies such as Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Stability AI have also been sued by copyright holders for using their works in AI training.
OpenAI and others argue that AI training makes fair use of copyrighted material scraped from the internet.
ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January before being overtaken by Meta’s Threads app. The new lawsuit in San Francisco claims that works such as books, plays and articles are particularly valuable for ChatGPT’s training because they are “the best examples of high-quality, long-form writing.”
The authors claim that their work was included in ChatGPT’s training dataset without their permission and argue that the system can accurately summarize their work and generate text that mimics their style.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and an order to stop OpenAI’s “unlawful and unfair business practices.”
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