Two award-winning authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

Questions about the ethics, transparency, and regulation of artificial intelligence (A.I.) have proliferated among creatives ever since ChatGPT exploded into the marketplace in late 2022. And now, two award-winning authors are taking OpenAI to court over allegedly “ingesting” their novels and regurgitating summaries of them without their consent, credit, or compensation.

Filed in late June, the lawsuit claims that ChatGPT’s underlying large language model “ingested” the copyrighted work of the case’s plaintiffs, authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay. They argue that ChatGPT’s ability to produce detailed summaries of their works indicates their books were included in datasets used to train the technology.

The suit is the latest example of the tension between creatives and generative AI tools capable of producing text and images in seconds. Many workers in creative fields are concerned with how fast-developing technology could impact their careers and livelihoods. And these concerns may increasingly manifest in legal challenges. 

Expects suggest many more authors will sue companies developing large language models and generative AI as these programs advance and improve at replicating the style of writers and artists. Though proving the authors in the case incurred monetary damages due to OpenAI’s data collection practices, as the complaint alleges, may be challenging.

ChatGPT may have gleaned Awad and Tremblay’s work from alternative sources other than the source material from the authors, but it was possible the bot “ingested” their books like the lawsuit claims. And showing that ChatGPT would have behaved differently if it never scooped up the work of the authors is unlikely due to the vast amount of data it scrapes off the web.

Awad and Tremblay’s lawsuit was filed on the same day OpenAI received another legal complaint, alleging the company pilfered “massive amounts of personal data” that it later fed into ChatGPT. The 157-page complaint, which excluded the full names of the 16 plaintiffs, criticized the company for absorbing “essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could take.”

As for Awad and Tremblay’s lawsuit, filed in a district court in Northern California, the authors are seeking damages and the restitution of what they say are lost profits. The filing also presented documents containing the ChatGPT-produced summaries of Awad’s novels “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl” and “Bunny,” as well as Tremblay’s “The Cabin at the End of the World.” Tremblay’s novel was adapted to the M. Night Shyamalan film “Knock at the Cabin.”