OpenAI has filed a motion to dismiss a copyright lawsuit brought against it. The lawsuit alleges that the company's ChatGPT model infringes on the copyrights of authors by generating text based on their works. OpenAI's motion, filed in the United States District Court – Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, disputes these claims.
The lawsuit was initiated by an author, who argues that every response generated by ChatGPT is a derivative work of copyrighted material. The author's claim centers around the idea that ChatGPT's responses are based on the vast amount of text it has been trained on, which includes copyrighted works.
According to the official motion to dismiss by the United States District Court – Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, OpenAI argues that the author's claims are “legally insufficient.” The company states that “a machine learning model's output does not necessarily constitute a derivative work of the input.” OpenAI further contends that the author fails to “identify any specific work that has been infringed upon.“
OpenAI disputes the author's claims that every ChatGPT response is a derivative work. It´s motion to dismiss is based on the argument that the author's claims are “legally insufficient.”
The outcome of the lawsuit remains uncertain. However, it is clear that OpenAI is mounting a strong defense against the copyright infringement allegations. The case is being closely watched by many in the tech and legal communities, as it could have significant implications for the future of artificial intelligence and copyright law.
Other Legal Motions Against OpenAI and AI Chatbots
This is not the first time that content owners have tried to push back against services such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Bing Chat. In July, I reported on leading news companies looking to sue AI tech firms over copyright infringement.
The AI firms are accused by the publishers of stealing and twisting their articles and spreading them on different platforms, such as websites, apps, or social media. The publishers say that this violates their intellectual property rights and hurts their business model. Some of the AI firms that might face the lawsuit include OpenAI, which has a natural language generation model. The lawsuit could affect the future of journalism and innovation, as both the publishers and the AI firms say that they are doing good for the public and helping them access information.
Also in July, Meta Platforms and OpenAI were hit with lawsuits earlier this month. The lawsuits, which were filed on Friday in a San Francisco federal court, accuse Meta and OpenAI of using the comedy routines of Sarah Silverman and the books of Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey to train their massive language models. These models power the chatbots ChatGPT and LLaMA, which can generate natural language responses to user queries.
The question of who has the rights to the content produced by AI services is a hot topic. One might assume that chatbots like Bing Chat or ChatGPT create their content from scratch. Tech companies are not very clear about AI capabilities, so casual observers might believe this. But the truth is that these services are using content from online sources and reshaping it into something that seems new.
The same thing is happening with AI coding tools. These services let users ask AI to fill in parts of code to help them finish their project. Services like GitHub Copilot are basically using other people's code – but only bits and pieces – and using it to complete the code for other users. This approach has already faced criticism with a lawsuit against GitHub Copilot.
