Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence research startup OpenAIlaunched ChatGPT in November 2022. The generative AI model can respond to users’ text prompts in a human-like conversational way. Just two months after its launch, the AI system became the fastest-growing consumer app as it reached 100 million active users in January. According to a report by Reuters, two US-based authors have sued OpenAI in San Francisco federal court.The lawsuit is part of a proposed class action where other copyright owners have also accused the company of misusing their works to “train” its popular generative AI tool, ChatGPT.
OpenAI sued by US authors
The lawsuit filed by Massachusetts-based writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad claims that OpenAI has ChatGPT infringed the authors’ copyrights. The writers’ alleged that the data mined by the generative AI tool was copied from thousands of books without permission.
The content created by ChatGPT and other generative AI systems uses huge amounts of data scraped from the internet. Tremblay and Awad’s lawsuit claimed that books are a “key ingredient” for such data as they offer the “best examples of high-quality long-form writing.”
The lawsuit accused OpenAI’s training incorporated data from nearly over 300,000 books. The plaintiffs also claimed that the data used for training ChatGPT was gained from unlawful sources which includes illegal “shadow libraries” that offer copyrighted books without permission.
Tremblay and Awad accused ChatGPT can generate “very accurate” summaries of their books. This indicates that their writings appeared in the AI tool’s database.

On behalf of a class of copyright owners in the US whose works OpenAI has allegedly misused, the lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of money in damages.
Other copyright owners suing OpenAI
Several other plaintiffs have brought in legal challenges over the data used to train other AI systems as well. Some source source-code owners have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft‘s GitHub while visual artists have accused image-creating tools including Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt. The companies targeted by the proposed class action lawsuit have argued that their systems have utilised the copyrighted data fairly.