OpenAI and Microsoft find themselves embroiled in yet another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time brought forth by nonfiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage. The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court on January 5, follows a similar case from The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging the unauthorized use of content from the newspaper for training AI chatbots.
This recent legal action comes after OpenAI acknowledged the need for compensating copyright owners, including the plaintiffs, for utilizing their works. The Times' lawsuit seeks significant damages, stated to be in the "billions of dollars."
The lawsuit by Basbanes and Gage seeks damages of up to $150,000 per copyright infringement, as outlined in the filing. In response to the lawsuit, The New York Times emphasized their commitment to respecting content creators' rights and ensuring their fair participation in AI technology advancements and new revenue models.
In a separate development, a collective of published writers in New York, including notable names such as George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jonathan Franzen, associated with the Authors Guild, joined a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI in September.
Additionally, author Julian Sancton is suing both OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the unauthorized use of nonfiction authors' works in training AI models.
Beyond copyright issues, the creator of the widely-used chatbot ChatGPT is facing another legal challenge, a class-action lawsuit in California. Filed by the Clarkson Law Firm in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on June 28, 2023, the lawsuit accuses OpenAI of allegedly extracting private user information from the internet without consent. It asserts that ChatGPT was trained using data sourced from social media comments, blog posts, Wikipedia entries, and family recipes without obtaining permission from the respective users.
