While the lawsuit follows a series of similar legal challenges, it features a roster of well-known plaintiffs including authors George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult. The case targets a company at the center of a wave of artificial intelligence-driven programs that can instantaneously suggest recipes, compose poems and muse over existentialism.
In a statement to ABC News, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company has held constructive discussions in general with creators and remains confident its technology will prove beneficial to them. The primary argument made in the lawsuit brought by the authors, in turn, centers on the alleged illegal use of copyrighted material for the training of the AI models, Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law School who specializes in the overlap between technology and copyright, told ABC News.
“We know how copyright infringements operate but we don’t know how these data sets work. We don’t even have the ability to look under the hood to see what type of information they are and are not using,” Buckmire said. “This lawsuit could open the pandora’s box, so to speak, to give light to what’s going on.