Eleven award-winning nonfiction authors, including Pulitzer Prize recipients Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff, and Kai Bird, have joined an existing lawsuit alleging copyright infringement by OpenAI and Microsoft.
It’s no surprise that Pulitzer winners aren’t taking copyright infringement lightly. The authors filed the amended complaint in a Manhattan federal court, accusing the tech giants of scraping online copies of their books without permission.
According to the authors, OpenAI used extensive passages and excerpts from their works to train its popular ChatGPT conversational AI and other natural language models.
But the lawsuit doesn’t stop at OpenAI’s door. The group of writers contends that Microsoft also bears responsibility, given its substantial investments in the AI startup, reportedly totaling billions of dollars. They argue that Microsoft should share liability and seek monetary damages from both tech giants.
The lawsuit also requests a court injunction permanently barring the companies from any ongoing unauthorized use of their published works.
Both tech firms have broadly denied the lawsuit’s accusations, claiming they have not improperly utilized the books in question.
So what’s at stake? The outcome of this lawsuit may have far-reaching implications for the industry, setting precedents for how AI developers engage with existing intellectual property. The authors behind this legal action await a response from OpenAI and Microsoft, hoping for both financial restitution and a legal mandate to protect their copyrighted works from future unauthorized use.
