Authors Guild to add Microsoft in its lawsuit against OpenAI

MANHATTAN (CN) — The Authors Guild will be adding Microsoft as a defendant in its class action against OpenAI for copyright infringement of fiction works, attorneys for the organization said Wednesday in Manhattan federal court.  

The class action, organized by The Authors Guild, accuses OpenAI of copyright infringement of various authors’ works of fiction. The Authors Guild says OpenAI used their works to develop algorithms that allow anyone to generate similar texts they would otherwise pay writers to create.

According to The Authors Guild’s attorneys, they will file an amended complaint by Monday that adds Microsoft as a defendant in the lawsuit.

“Without plaintiffs’ and the proposed class’s copyrighted works, defendants would have a vastly different commercial product,” Rachel Geman, a partner with Lieff Cabraser and attorney for the writers, said in a statement. “Defendants’ decision to copy authors’ works, done without offering any choices or providing any compensation, threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole.”

The Authors Guild is joined by 17 other authors on the lawsuit, including “Game of Thrones” creator George R.R. Martin and authors Elin Hilderbrand, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult.

According to the authors, OpenAI used their works to train its “large language models” or “LLMs,” algorithms designed to output human-seeming text responses to users’ prompts and queries.

ChatGPT, an AI application that generates dialogue based on user inquiries, is then being used to generate “low-quality e-books, impersonating authors and displacing human-authored books,” the authors say in the complaint.

According to the authors, ChatGPT accurately generated summaries of the their works and could generate an outline for a potential sequel to the authors’ work using the same characters as in the existing books.

This is the latest in a wave of legal action from professional writers who are concerned artificial intelligence threatening their profession.

OpenAI asked a federal judge in California to dismiss two similar lawsuits in August, one by comedian Sarah Silverman and another from author Paul Tremblay.

In September, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and other writers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in San Francisco for copyright infringement. Like The Authors Guild’s lawsuit, writers in the San Francisco complaint say OpenAI copied their works without permission to teach its algorithms to respond to human requests.

Unlike those other lawsuits, Geman says the complaint brought forward by The Authors Guild and other writers is unique because the class exclusively represents professional fiction writers.

In June 2023, The Authors Guild also wrote an open letter calling on OpenAI and other major technology companies to fairly license authors’ works for use in algorithm training.

“As a result of embedding our writings in your systems, generative AI threatens to damage our profession by flooding the market with mediocre, machine-written books, stories, and journalism based on our work,” the letter reads.

At the time the complaint was filed in June 2023, almost 12,000 authors had signed the letter.

Follow @NikaSchoonover

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