OpenAI and its investor, Microsoft, are facing multiple lawsuits accusing their large language models (LLMs) of using other people’s copyrighted works without their permission.
It’s “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” OpenAI wrote in its written evidence submission to the U.K.’s House of Lords Committee’s inquiry, which was reported by The Guardian.
The company said that it expects to see more lawsuits against them about this in the future.
OpenAI explained that because so much of the work in today’s world is copyright protected, from blog posts to photographs, it would be “limiting” to train their AI only using public domain work that could date back to a century ago.
OpenAI did admit that they still have work to do to support creators. That includes allowing publishers to block the GPTBot web crawler from being able to access their websites and protected works. In addition, they are also working with rightsholders to opt out of any AI training and that it’s working to create mutually beneficial agreements with people and companies.
In some of the lawsuits filed against OpenAI and Microsoft, the plaintiffs accuse them of refusing to pay authors for their work, citing that OpenAI and Microsoft are experiencing massive financial gain from copyrighted materials.
The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, where it cited instances where ChatGPT gave users excerpts of written text from paywalled articles. OpenAI said the suit from The Times has no merit and that it still hopes a partnership can be made with the publication.
Source: Engadget
