OpenAI Seeks Court's Dismissal of Authors' Claims in AI Copyright Dispute
OpenAI Fights Back Against Lawsuits Over Use of Prose in ChatGPT Training
OpenAI is trying to dismiss various claims in two legal actions launched by authors and comedians, who sued the machine-learning super-lab for scraping their books to train ChatGPT without explicit permission.
Lawsuits Filed Against OpenAI
In June, novelists Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in the US over its harvesting of prose. Days later, comedian Sarah Silverman and novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey also sued the biz. Both parties accused the ChatGPT maker of copyright infringement for ingesting their work to train the chatbot.
OpenAI's Response
OpenAI's lawyers have hit back, asking a federal court in San Francisco to dismiss five out six claims brought by Tremblay and Awad, those being: vicarious infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment. It is, however, prepared to fight the first claim of direct copyright infringement in hope of winning it to make a point to any other creative person considering pursuing it.
Argument of Fair Use
Lawyers for the AI biz argued OpenAI has not violated copyright laws at all and that ChatGPT is protected under fair use. US copyright law states that "transformative uses" of work – where the original source is repurposed – is considered fair use. Although the large language model ingested the authors and comedian's books, it transformed their text for different applications. That's the argument, anyway.
Controversy and Legal Gray Area
AI and copyright is a contentious legal gray area. Similar lawsuits have been filed by visual artists, who claim companies like Stability AI have trained text-to-image models on their artwork. Although the US Copyright Office has declared that works which are "not the product of human authorship" cannot be protected, officials are unsure about other issues.
The office issued a request for public comment this week on copyright law and policy issues raised by AI.
The Register has asked the plaintiffs' lawyers for comment. ®
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