OpenAI is being sued in the United States for purportedly misappropriating artists' work to train ChatGPT

On Wednesday, two US writers sued OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco, saying that the business misappropriated their writings to "train" its popular generative artificial-intelligence system ChatGPT.

According to Massachusetts-based writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, ChatGPT harvested data without authorization from hundreds of books, infringing on the authors' copyrights.

Matthew Butterick, the writers' attorney, declined to comment. Representatives for OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed private startup, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Several legal challenges have been brought in relation to the material used to train cutting-edge AI systems. Source-code owners are suing OpenAI and Microsoft's GitHub, while graphic artists are suing Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt.

The targets of the case have claimed that their systems constitute fair use of copyrighted content.

ChatGPT reacts to text requests from users in a conversational manner. It became the fastest-growing consumer application in history earlier this year, with 100 million active users just two months after its inception.

ChatGPT and other generative AI systems generate content by scraping massive volumes of online data. Books, according to Tremblay and Awad's complaint, are a "key ingredient" since they provide the "best examples of high-quality longform writing."

According to the lawsuit, OpenAI's training data included over 300,000 books, including those obtained from illicit "shadow libraries" that sell copyrighted books without authorization.

Awad is recognised for her works such as "13 Ways to Look at a Fat Girl" and "Bunny." Among Tremblay's novels is 'The Cabin at the End of the World,' which was transformed into the M. Night Shyamalan film 'Knock at the Cabin,' which was released in February.

Tremblay and Awad claimed that ChatGPT could create "very accurate" summaries of their books based on the fact that they were in its database.

The action demands specific monetary damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright holders whose works OpenAI is accused of misusing.