Two authors in the United States filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, in a San Francisco federal court on Wednesday, 28 June.
The lawsuit alleged that the AI company was involved in the misuse of the authors' copyrighted works in order to "train" its artificial intelligence system ChatGPT.
The two authors, Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, have alleged in a proposed class action that OpenAI and its affiliates violated copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and California and general statute restrictions on unfair competition.
Open AI has argued, however, that the company made "fair use" of the copyrighted material, according to Reuters.
Trembley and Awad also mentioned in the lawsuit that books are a "key ingredient" because they offer the "best examples of high-quality long-form writing."
According to the lawsuit, OpenAI's training data has used material from an estimated 300,000 books or more. This includes material from illegal "shadow libraries" that provide unauthorised access to copyrighted books.
Reaching 100 million active users only a couple of months after its launch in January 2023, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
(With inputs from Reuters.)
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