Microsoft, OpenAI sued over copyright infringement by authors

Two authors of nonfiction books sued microsoft OpenAI’s class action complaint alleges that the defendants “simply stole” the authors’ works to help build a billion-dollar artificial intelligence system.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, comes more than a week after the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, the developer of the AI ​​chatbot ChatGPT, for similar copyright infringement. The case was filed alleging that both companies used newspaper content for extensive language training. model.

Microsoft is an investor and supplier to OpenAI.

A new lawsuit by authors Nicholas Basbens and Nicholas Gage follows up on the Times lawsuit by arguing that “copyright owners like the plaintiffs must be compensated for the use of their works by the defendants.” “We have publicly acknowledged that this is not the case.” The Times’ lawsuit seeks “billions of dollars” in monetary damages.

Mr. Basbens and Mr. Gage said in their lawsuit that they seek to represent a class of writers whose “copyrighted works have been systematically stolen” by Microsoft and Open AI.

“They are no different than any other thief,” the suit says.

According to the lawsuit, that class includes “authors or legal beneficiaries of copyrights in works owned by or used by defendants to train large-scale language models.” This includes all people in the United States. The class size is estimated to be tens of thousands of people, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks damages of up to $150,000 for each work infringed by the defendants.

In September, a group of prominent American fiction writers, including George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and Michael Connelly, sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in federal court in Manhattan, seeking to represent the group of fiction writers. Appealed.

The new lawsuit says OpenAI’s system relies on training by ingesting “large amounts of documentation,” including books written by Basbens and Gage.

CNBC has reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI for comment on this new lawsuit.

Basbanes has been a journalist for many years and has written several books about books and the people who collect them, including The Gentle Madness, the Bibliophile, the Bibliomane, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “and so on.

Mr. Gage is an investigative reporter who has worked for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. His best-selling memoir, Eleni, detailing his family’s experiences in Greece during World War II, was made into a film starring John Malkovich.

In 1987, then-President Ronald Reagan mentioned Gage’s name as “Eleni” in a nationally televised address after a summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gage has written several other books and is credited as an executive producer on the film “The Godfather III.”

“We respect the rights of content creators and owners and will work with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models,” OpenAI said in a statement after being sued by the New York Times Law Weekly. I will do my best to do so.”

“Our ongoing dialogue with The New York Times has been productive and progressing constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed by this development. Like many other companies, we are looking forward to a mutually beneficial way of working together. “We look forward to finding the publisher,” it said in a statement.

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