Recently, Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence company, have been repeatedly taken to court over copyright issues. On January 5, well-known American writers Nicholas Basbane and Nicholas Gage filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan, New York, accusing the two companies of infringing their copyrights and those of other writers.
The authors allege in the lawsuit that Microsoft and OpenAI used information from their books to train artificial intelligence products, including the chatbot ChatGPT, and that the actions of the two companies constituted "malicious mass theft of copyrighted works."
The lawsuit alleges that it is intolerable that Microsoft and OpenAI, without obtaining a license or compensation, "stole" the authors' work to build a multibillion-dollar business. The two writers demanded damages from Microsoft and OpenAI.
Prior to this, the two companies had already been sued by several American writers. On December 27 last year, the New York Times also filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, becoming the first major American media to sue an artificial intelligence technology company for infringement.
ChatGPT is a large language model-based chatbot program developed by OpenAI. Microsoft is OpenAI's largest investor and important partner.
With the development of artificial intelligence technology, the application of large language models is becoming more and more extensive, and the copyright disputes behind them are also intensifying. These writers, as well as the New York Times, argue that their work involves a significant investment of intellectual and financial resources, and that the unauthorized use of their work by AI technology companies has caused them enormous losses. Some technology companies that develop AI products argue that the content available on the open internet can be used to train AI products under the relevant legal provisions.
The U.S. Copyright Office said the department has launched an initiative to study a range of issues raised by artificial intelligence. In August last year, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a notice soliciting comments on the initiative and is evaluating whether legislative or regulatory measures are warranted. (CCTV News)