OpenAI denies infringement allegations in author copyright cases
OpenAI has responded in California federal court to allegations that it misused the work of authors including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and comedian Sarah Silverman to train its artificial-intelligence language model.
The Microsoft-backed AI company said in an answer to the complaints on Tuesday that it makes fair use of copyrighted content to teach models like the one underlying its popular chatbot ChatGPT to create original material.
«The models learn, as we all do, from what has come before,» OpenAI said in its filing. «The fair use defense exists for precisely that reason: to encourage and allow the development of new ideas that build on earlier ones.»
Attorneys for the authors and attorneys and spokespeople for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing on Wednesday.
Copyright owners including writers, news outlets and music publishers have filed several high-stakes lawsuits against tech companies over the alleged exploitation of their work without permission in order to train text-based generative AI systems. The group of authors that includes Silverman, Coates and Chabon filed separate lawsuits against Meta Platforms and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over their systems last year.
Meta and OpenAI have both convinced judges to dismiss some of the claims, though courts have not yet addressed the core question of whether the use of material scraped from the internet to train AI infringes copyrights on a massive scale.
Tech companies have said that AI training is protected by
