Good morning TCPAWorld!

There are currently two massive lawsuits out there against OpenAI – both filed on June 28, 2023.

In the second lawsuit, named Plaintiffs Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad have filed a class action against OpenAI, Inc., and its various alleged “co-conspirators” in the Northern District of California for its use of their copyrighted materials in training ChatGPT’s AI software.

OpenAI sells a program called ChatGPT. ChatGPT uses two AI software, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which are large language models. These large language models are trained using training datasets, and books have traditionally been a part of these training datasets.

Plaintiffs are authors whose copyrighted works have allegedly been used in training ChatGPT and as such, claim that OpenAI is illegally profiting from those copyrighted works.

Plaintiffs claim the use of their copyrighted works along with those works of class members is a violation of several statutes: 1) Direct Copyright Infringement under 17 U.S.C 106; 2) Vicarious Copyright Infringement under 17 U.S.C 106; 3) Digital Millenium Copyright Act;  4) Unfair Competition under the California Business and Professions Code; 5) Negligence under California Civil Code section 1714; and 6) Unjust Enrichment.

Now, what is interesting here is what Plaintiffs are claiming as proof of this use: summaries of Plaintiffs books that were mostly correct that ChatGPT provided when prompted to provide those summaries.

The class includes:

“All persons or entities domiciled in the United States that own a United States copyright in any work that was used as training data for the OpenAI Language Models during the Class Period.”

We will keep a close eye on both lawsuits against OpenAI.