UK Society of Authors welcomes legal action against OpenAI

The UK Society of Authors (SoA) has welcomed the news that authors in the US are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, reports the Bookseller.

The class action lawsuit, brought in a San Francisco federal court, follows revelations that OpenAI’s ChatGPT, as well Google’s BERT—another large language model—was trained using more than 7000 books scraped from self-publishing platform Smashwords.

Authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad are the named plaintiffs in the suit, on behalf of a broad class of authors of copyrighted material.

SoA CEO Nicola Solomon told the Bookseller the organisation has ‘long been concerned at the wholesale copying of authors’ and illustrators’ work to train large language models’.

‘The consent and remuneration of authors whose works are being used to develop and train AI systems is vital,’ said Solomon. ‘Creators must be asked before their work is used—using an opt-in rather than opt-out approach. Developers should also be required to publish the data sources they have used to train their AI systems so that copyright holders know when their works have been used … This is not a victimless crime’.

In June the UK Publishers Association formed an AI taskforce, while in Australia, the Australian Publishers Association, along with other organisations representing creators, has contacted the government to express concerns about the risks generative AI presents to rights holders.

Category: International news