The Author’s Guild in the United States opened a class-action lawsuit against the Microsoft-backed OpenAI on Sept. 19 due to its alleged misuse of copyrighted material in the training of its artificial intelligence (AI) models. According to court documents, the oldest and largest professional organization for writers in the U.S. is operating under the Copyright Act and seeking “redress” for what it calls “flagrant and harmful infringement” of registered copyrights in written works of fiction. It goes on to argue that works were copied wholesale and without permission or “consideration” by feeding them into large language models (LLMs). “These algorithms are at the heart of Defendants’ massive commercial enterprise. And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale.” The Author’s Guild said it represents a class of professional fiction writers whose “works spring from their own minds and their creative literary expression.” It says, therefore, that since their livelihoods derive from these creative works, the LLMs “endanger” the ability of fiction writers to make a living. It suggested that the AI models could’ve been trained via the public domain, or OpenAI could have paid a licensing fee for the usage of the copyrighted works.
Full story : The Author’s Guild launches class-action lawsuit against OpenAI.
