In a recent legal battle, OpenAI, a leading AI research institute, has scored a significant victory. A federal judge has dismissed a major portion of a lawsuit filed against the company by prominent authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The lawsuit pertained to the alleged use of copyrighted books by OpenAI to train its generative artificial intelligence chatbot.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, in an order issued on February 12, made a significant ruling by refusing to allow claims for vicarious copyright infringement, negligence, and unjust enrichment to proceed against OpenAI. The judge rejected the authors' claim that every answer generated by OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, was an infringing work facilitated by information extracted from copyrighted material. The court found that the authors failed to provide evidence of any outputs that were substantially similar to their own books.
