Nonfiction Writers Sue Microsoft and OpenAI for Alleged Copyright Violation

On Tuesday, a lawsuit was filed against Microsoft and OpenAI alleging that the multinational tech giant and the U.S. AI company have instructed the AI chatbot ChatGPT to steal copyrighted material from nonfiction authors’ work from academic journals without their permission, according to Forbes.

The lawsuit, which was filed with the Manhattan federal court, was initiated by Julian Sancton, New York Times best-selling author of “Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic Night.” The case alleged that he and thousands of other nonfiction authors received no compensation for the use of their intellectual property by AI.

Also in the mix of writers involved in this case are co-writers Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, who wrote the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus” that was adapted into the hit film “Oppenheimer” this year, and Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch. They all allege that the two companies violated their copyrights by using their work to teach OpenAI’s GPT large language models.

Microsoft and OpenAI reaped the financial rewards from their work by turning over billions of dollars on their AI products, as highlighted by the lawsuit. 

OpenAI has already been experiencing turbulence since its former CEO Sam Altman was fired unexpectedly, after which over 750 employees threatened to walk out if he wasn’t brought back.

According to Susman Godfrey from the law firm where the suit was filed, ChatGPT confirmed that Sancton’s book was a part of the dataset that was used to prompt the chatbot.

The complaint states, “Nonfiction authors often spend years conceiving, researching, and writing their creations. While OpenAI and Microsoft refuse to pay nonfiction authors, their AI platform is worth a fortune. The basis of the OpenAI platform is nothing less than the rampant theft of copyrighted works.”

The complaint also highlights that both companies worked together to employ their AI-driven products, such as ChatGPT, to recognize and figure out text inputs from users that “generate text that has been calibrated to mimic a human written response.” 

“Defendants have made commercial reproductions of millions, possibly billions, of copyrighted works without any compensation to authors, without a license, and without permission,” the lawsuit reads. “In doing so, they have infringed on the exclusive rights of Plaintiffs and other writers and rightsholders whose work has been copied and appropriated to train their artificial intelligence models.”

“Defendants’ models were calibrated (or “trained,” in Defendants’ parlance) by reproducing a massive corpus of copyrighted material, including, upon information and belief, tens or hundreds of thousands of nonfiction books,” the lawsuit added.

OpenAI has previously said in relation to other allegations that were similar that the content generated by ChatGPT does not include “derivative work” and therefore doesn’t mean a copyright infringement. However, neither Microsoft nor OpenAI have commented on this lawsuit yet.