Writers sue chatGPT owner over copyright infringement

• Writers say OpenAI infringed copyright law during training of the LLMs.
• Large Language Models (LLM) are trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like text.

Before the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the idea about generative artificial intelligence was not mainstream. However, this has changed as ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history to reach 100 million monthly users (a title currently held by Meta’s Threads app).

There are currently over three proposed copyright-infringement class action lawsuits filed against OpenAI. The lawsuits stem over the use of copyrighted work in AI training, with the recent lawsuit brought by a group of U.S. authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon.

Large language models are a type of AU that are trained on a massive trove of articles, Wikipedia entries, books, internet-based sources and other input to produce human-like responses to natural language queries. As such, the authors allege that their writing was included in ChatGPT’s training dataset without their permission, arguing that the system can accurately summarize their works and generate text that mimics their styles.

Not surprisingly, a number of nations and government agencies around the globe have launched efforts to deal with AI tools.