Prominent US Authors File Lawsuit Against OpenAI for Copyright Infringement

The Authors Guild, a trade group for U.S. authors, has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI on behalf of prominent writers including John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, accusing the company of unlawfully training its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, on their work. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI scraped text from the authors' books, potentially from illegal online "pirate" book repositories, to train its language model. OpenAI and other AI defendants argue that their use of training data qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law. The Authors Guild asserts that authors should have control over how their works are used by generative AI to preserve literature and prevent the displacement of human-authored books. Similar lawsuits are pending against Meta Platforms and Stability AI.