OpenAI Hit With Another Copyright Suit From Pair of Journalists

OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are facing another copyright lawsuit from a pair of journalists who alleged their books and articles were used to train ChatGPT. The purported class action comes only a week after the two leading AI companies were hit by a groundbreaking suit from The New York Times Co.

Investigative journalist Nicholas Gage and author Nicholas Basbanes said in the complaint, filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, that OpenAI has admitted to using e-book datasets including “Books2" that likely comes from pirated repositories online.

The suit mirrors a number of similar class actions from high-profile authors including Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin, and the writers’ organization Authors Guild, which also allege their work was scraped without permission to be used for AI model training.

OpenAI and Microsoft didn’t immediately return a request for comment. AI companies have argued copying books and articles for the purpose of training large language models falls under copyright law’s fair use doctrine.

The Times’ lawsuit contained an additional set of allegations: that OpenAI’s latest model ChatGPT-4 could reproduce near-verbatim text of entire copyrighted articles when prompted correctly—evidence that hadn’t yet made it into a legal case.

The suit from Gage and Basbanes said that “until recently, ChatGPT provided verbatim quotes of copyrighted text.”

“Currently, it instead readily offers to produce summaries of such text,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. “These summaries themselves are derivative works, the creation of which is inherently based on the original unlawfully copied work.”

Gage, whose memoir about life in Greece during World War II was turned into the film “Eleni,” is known for his investigative work for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Basbanes, a former journalist, has written a number of books about the history of publishing and the printed word.

Grant Herrmann Schwartz & Klinger LLP represents the journalists.

The case is Basbanes v. Microsoft Corp., S.D.N.Y., No. 1:24-cv-00084, complaint filed 1/5/24.