Award-winning novelists Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, and, separately comedian Sarah Silverman and novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have sued OpenAI and accused the startup of training ChatGPT on their books without consent, violating copyright laws.
The lawsuits, both filed in the Northern District Court of San Francisco, say ChatGPT generates accurate summaries of their books and highlighted this as evidence for the software being trained on their work.
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In the second suit, Silverman et al [PDF], make similar claims.
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OpenAI trains its large language models by scraping text from the internet, and although it hasn’t revealed exactly what resources it has swallowed up, the startup has admitted to training its systems on hundreds of thousands of books protected by copyright, and stored on websites like Sci-Hub or Bibliotik.
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Source: Comedian, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping books • The Register
The problem is though, that people read books too. And they can (and do) create accurate summaries from them. What is worse, is that the creativity shown by people can be shown to be influenced by the books, art, dance, etc that they have ingested. So maybe people should be banned from reading books as well under copyright?
Robin Edgar
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