A number of visual artists have filed suit over use of their images as training data for text-to-image generators. Now, two well-known novelists have filed their own class-action suit against OpenAI, accusing the company behind ChatGPT and Bing Chat of copyright infringement because it allegedly used their books as training data. This appears to be the first lawsuit filed over the use of text (as opposed to images or code) being used as training data.
In the lawsuit filed in the United States District Court of the Northern District of California, plaintiffs Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad allege that OpenAI and its subsidiaries committed copyright infringement, violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and also ran afoul of California and common law restrictions on unfair competition. The writers are represented by Joseph Saveri Law Firm and Matthew Butterick, the same team that is behind recent lawsuits filed against Diffusion AI and GitHub (over GitHub copilot).
