Even though James Cameron has been warning about artificial intelligence for decades, it’s nonetheless ramped up considerably in the last year. While D.C. lawmakers have been slow to enact regulation — some are busy leading a clown car impeachment of the president — certain citizens are taking the matter into their own hands: On Wednesday, a group of authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the chatbot company (in)famous for replicating imitations of other artists’ work.
As per The New York Times, the charges was led by a diverse gang of over a dozen luminaries, including George R.R. Martin, Josh Grisham, and Jonathan Franzen. The authors, numbering more than dozen, accused the company of infringing on their copyrights, having used their works to train their popular ChatGPT, which can believably (sometimes) duplicate another author’s work, living or dead.
“The success and profitability of OpenAI are predicated on mass copyright infringement without a word of permission from or a nickel of compensation to copyright owners,” reads the complaint.
While OpenAI hasn’t officially confirmed that they’ve been feeding entire tomes to their chatbots, the complaint points out that their summaries of books include details not available in reviews or elsewhere, strongly suggesting they’ve imbibed entire works.
Since debuting last November, ChatGPT has led to an influx in AI-generated books that have flooded Amazon. Some include travel guides, even books on plant and fungi foraging. That last one prompted the New York Mycological Society to issue a much-needed warning for people not to put their lives in the hands of robots.
(Via NYT)