OpenAI Disputes Authors' Claims That Every ChatGPT Response is Derivative Work

OpenAI has responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors -- including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey -- who earlier this summer alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on pirated copies of their books. From a report: In OpenAI's motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits), the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at "a later stage of the case." The authors' other claims -- alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment -- need to be "trimmed" from the lawsuits "so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability," OpenAI argued. OpenAI claimed that the authors "misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence." According to OpenAI, even if the authors' books were a "tiny part" of ChatGPT's massive dataset, "the use of copyrighted materials by innovators in transformative ways does not violate copyright." Unlike plagiarists who seek to directly profit off distributing copyrighted materials, OpenAI argued that its goal was "to teach its models to derive the rules underlying human language" in order to do things like help people "save time at work," "make daily life easier," or simply entertain themselves by typing prompts into ChatGPT. The purpose of copyright law, OpenAI argued is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by protecting the way authors express ideas, but "not the underlying idea itself, facts embodied within the author's articulated message, or other building blocks of creative," which are arguably the elements of authors' works that would be useful to ChatGPT's training model. Citing a notable copyright case involving Google Books, OpenAI reminded the court that "while an author may register a copyright in her book, the 'statistical information' pertaining to 'word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers' in that book are beyond the scope of copyright protection."

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