Two well known authors sue OpenAI claiming ChatGPT illegally accessed their work

The concerns about AI chatbots like ChatGPT scraping content from all over the internet without the consent of others have resulted in yet another lawsuit against its creators at OpenAI. This time the lawsuit comes from two well-known authors who claim the ChatGPT bot trained on their books, which if true would be a violation of their copyrights.

CNBC reports that one of the authors involved in the lawsuit is Paul Tremblay, who is best known for his 2018 horror novel The Cabin at the End of the World. The novel was recently adapted into the film Knock at the Cabin by director M. Night Shyamalan.

The other writer named in the lawsuit is Mona Awad, who is an acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Bunny, and All's Well, the latter two of which are considered to be horror-themed novels.

The lawsuit states:

Plaintiffs and Class members did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material for ChatGPT. Nonetheless, their copyrighted materials were ingested and used to train ChatGPT. 5. Indeed, when ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works—something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.

The authors are looking at an unnamed amount of "statutory and other damages" to be paid by OpenAI if the courts find in favor of their arguments. So far OpenAI has yet to comment on this lawsuit.

The company is already facing another lawsuit from a group of 16 people who allege OpenAI and its main development and financial partner Microsoft used their personal data to train ChatGPT without their consent. That group is looking to make this a class action lawsuit and is seeking damages of $3 billion. Again, OpenAI and Microsoft have yet to comment on this lawsuit.

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