Copyright infringement lawsuits against Open AI, led by American actress Sarah Silverman and "A Head Full of Ghost" author Paul Tremblay, have recently been partially dismissed by a California federal judge last Monday, Feb. 12, as reported by Reuters.
OpenAI logo seen on the screen of smartphone. AI software developer. London, United Kingdom, December 21, 2022.
Behind the Partial Dismissal of the OpenAI Book Lawsuits
The cases claimed that the company unlawfully used the authors' books to train its natural language processing AI tool, ChatGPT, which allows it to generate human-like literary output and response using only written prompts.
However, US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín rejected these claims by granting the bulk of OpenAI's motion to dismiss the authors' legal allegations in the meantime, for the reason that the arguments lacked basis.
In addition to that, Judge Martínez-Olguín also said that these lawsuits will be consolidated with similar cases brought forward by a separate collective of authors, which include American novelist Michael Chabon, short story writer Andrew Sean Greer, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The federal judge dismissed the claims on grounds that the authors' copyright infringement claims against OpenAI were insufficiently justified, especially because the authors weren't able to demonstrate the "substantial similarity" that ChatGPT's output had with their books.
Claims of OpenAI's negligence, unlawful enrichment, and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act were also dismissed. That said, the company still needs to face claims that it had breached the unfair competition law after it had utilized copyrighted books without the authors' consent.
Judge Martínez-Olguín has given the authors the "green light" to file for an amended complaint, at least until March 13.
The authors already requested the court last week to stop a similar case against OpenAI, which was made in New York and led by the Authors Guild alongside distinguished novelists George RR Martin, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Frazen, and David Baldacci, for "copying" their lawsuits.
