Alexander Lewis 
Dec 21, 2023
A total of 11 nonfiction authors have joined a case lodged against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the tech giants of using their work to train the AI models employed under artificial intelligence (AI) bots like ChatGPT.
The lawsuit was filed with the Manhattan federal court, wherein the writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff and Kai Bird — co-writer of the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus that became a superhit film "Oppenheimer" this year — told the court on Tuesday that the companies infringed their copyrights by using their work to train OpenAI's GPT large language models.
"The defendants are raking in billions from their unauthorised use of nonfiction books, and the authors of these books deserve fair compensation and treatment for it," Rohit Nath, authors' attorney, said during the court hearing.
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As per a Reuters report, the Sancton’s case is the latest in a long line of lawsuits brought by copyright owners, including John Grisham (author of The Grisham Book Club), George R. R. Martin (author of The Outsiders), and Jonathan Franzen (author of The Handmaid’s Tale), against OpenAI and other tech companies for allegedly using their work to train AI models nonconsensually.
The Sancton's case was the first author’s lawsuit against OpenAI that named Microsoft as a defendant, despite the tech giant’s billions of dollars in investment and its integration of OpenAI’s systems into many of its products.
The amended complaint filed Monday alleged that OpenAI “scraped” the authors’ works, along with thousands of other copyrighted materials from the internet, without permission, in order to train its GPT models to answer human text prompts.
