MATILDA BATTERSBY , The Bookseller; OpenAI copyright case reveals 'ease with which generative AI can devastate the market', says PA
"A judge’s ruling that legal action by authors against OpenAI for copyright infringement can go ahead reveals “the ease with which generative AI can devastate the market”, according to the Publishers Association (PA).
Last week, a federal judge in the US refused OpenAI’s attempts to dismiss claims by authors that text summaries of published works by ChatGPT (which is owned by OpenAI) infringes their copyrights.
The lawsuit, which is being heard in New York, brings together cases from a number of authors, as well as the Authors Guild, filed in various courts.
In his ruling, which upheld the authors’ right to attempt to sue OpenAI, District Judge Sidney Stein compared George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones to summaries of the novel created by ChatGPT.
Judge Stein said: “[A] discerning observer could easily conclude that this detailed summary is substantially similar to Martin’s original work because the summary conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters and themes of the original.”
The class action consolidates 12 complaints being brought against OpenAI and Microsoft. It argues copyrighted books were reproduced to train OpenAI’s artificial intelligence large language models (LLM) and, crucially, that LLMs, including ChatGPT, can infringe copyright via their output, ie the text produced when asked a question.
This landmark legal case is the first to examine whether the output of an AI chatbot infringes copyright, rather than looking at whether the training of the model was an infringement."
