OpenAI is a company mainly known for the creation of the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT. However, what you may not know is that the company is currently facing over two dozen lawsuits for violating copyright law and straying from their nonprofit mission.
The New York Times
On December 27, 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for use of its copyrighted articles. The company had been using articles from the news outlet to help build their artificial intelligence technology without paying or getting permission. The companies used articles from the New York Times as well as other content from news organizations and books for their large language model, which help AI tools such as ChatGPT learn how to form sentences and mimic human writing.
Open AI and Microsoft have claimed that their use of the articles and information from the internet falls under “fair use,” which in copyright law allows the use of the work of others as long as it is changed considerably. However, the New York Times has provided evidence of GPT-4 outputting copyrighted articles word for word.
Writers
The New York Times was not the only source that OpenAI and Microsoft used to train their artificial intelligence technology. Comedian Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI claiming they had used a pirated copy of her book, The Bedwetter, as training data due to the chatbots being able to accurately summarize her book. Similar lawsuits have been filed by novelists Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay. And now, more than 5,000 authors have signed a petition which demands tech companies get consent and give compensation and credit to writers whose work is used in training data for artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk
OpenAI is also facing a lawsuit from cofounder and now competitor Elon Musk. After publicly criticizing OpenAI over the last year as the company rose to fame for ChatGPT, Musk founded his own artificial intelligence company, X.AI, which is currently building their own AI model. Musk claims that OpenAI has strayed from its original nonprofit mission of benefiting humanity with AI. Musk claimed that the company is using their products such as ChatGPT for financial gain and asked the court to block them from doing so. Musk has also brought up the fact that they used material from his social media company, X, for training data. However, OpenAI disagrees with the lawsuit and believe that it stems from Musk’s regret about no longer being involved with the company.
So far, OpenAI has had mixed success with these lawsuits. Many of Sarah Silverman’s claims were dismissed, but the claims against OpenAI copying Silverman and other authors’ have been allowed to stand.
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