OpenAI is sued in a district court in New York by the Authors Guild and 17 well-established authors, including George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and Jonathan Franzen, over alleged copyright infringement.

The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI used the authors' copyrighted material without their consent to train its large language models (LLMs), thus endangering their ability to earn profit from their work. The plaintiffs also claimed that while OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, had the option to use publicly available materials, it chose to use copyrighted material without obtaining any licensing fees.

At the same time, OpenAI stated that the company is discussing with many authors worldwide to understand their concerns over AI.

Why does it matter?

This is not the first time OpenAI has been hit with a copyright lawsuit as Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden Richard Kadrey, and other prominent authors, including Michael Chabon, accused the company of copyright infringement. Other AI companies have faced similar lawsuits, including Stability AI, which Getty Images sued for allegedly copying and processing millions of images to train its AI image generator.

Therefore, the increasing number of lawsuits against AI companies over copyright infringement stresses the ethical considerations raised around AI development and the protection of copyrighted materials from original creators.