OpenAI sued again for copyright infringement

OpenAI and its financial supporter Microsoft have faced a new class action lawsuit by two US-based nonfiction authors for copyright infringement. Filed in a Manhattan federal court, the lawsuit claims that the two authors' works were improperly utilised by the companies to train the AI models behind ChatGPT and other AI-driven services.

Writers Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage told the court in a proposed class action that the companies infringed their copyrights by including several of their books as part of the data used to train OpenAI's GPT large language model.

Representatives for Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the complaint.

The lawsuit follows several others filed by fiction and nonfiction writers ranging from comedian Sarah Silverman to 'Game of Thrones' author George R.R. Martin against tech companies over the alleged use of their work to train AI programs.

The New York Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft last week over the use of its journalists' work to train AI applications.

Basbanes and Gage are both former journalists. Their lawyer, Michael Richter, said it was "outrageous" that the companies could use their works to "power a new billion-dollar-plus industry without any compensation".

On September last year, OpenAI was sued by a group of US authors in San Francisco over copyright infringement as well.