Writers group sues OpenAI over stories used to train ChatGPT
A publisher explains why it took OpenAI to court over stories it never paid to use.
This is the copyright fight that will decide whether AI companies owe creators anything for the text they use to train their models, and it is worth understanding before you use AI on anyone else's writing but your own.
A group of writers and their publisher has spent the last two years suing OpenAI over how it built ChatGPT. In OpenAI's early days, the company listed the sources of the data it used to train its models, something it has since stopped doing. Inside those listed sources, the writers found tens of thousands of their own stories. OpenAI never asked for permission to use the work, and never offered to pay a licensing fee, either then, while it was building its business, or now.
The timing matters. OpenAI is heading toward an initial public offering (selling shares to the public for the first time) that could value the company around $1 trillion. The writers argue that a company approaching that kind of valuation on the back of other people's work should have paid for it, or at least asked. As far as they know, OpenAI never sought permission from the many other publishers, writers, and everyday internet posters whose work it also used.
September 4, the date of this lawsuit update, is a real deadline: both sides have asked the court to rule on the case before it goes to trial. A ruling either way sets a precedent (a decision other courts then follow) for whether training an AI model on copyrighted work counts as fair use, or as theft that requires payment. That answer will shape how every AI company, and everyone using AI on someone else's content, should think about consent and payment going forward.
OpenAI never asked for permission to use our work, nor did they offer to pay a licensing fee.via Reddit r/ArtificialInteligence →