A lawsuit filed by a group of authors including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates against the organization OpenAI suffered a major setback this week after a federal judge dismissed most of its claims, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a U.S. district judge, threw out the authors’ claims of negligence, vicarious copyright infringement, and unjust enrichment in the lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company.
Silverman, along with authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden, filed suit against OpenAI last July, claiming that the company used their books to train its ChatGPT bot without their permission. The authors also sued Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, on similar grounds; that suit was also largely dismissed by a judge.
Martinez-Olguin said the authors did not provide sufficient evidence that any output from ChatGPT was “substantially similar—or similar at all” to their books. OpenAI, the judge said, did not have a duty to the authors to safeguard their work.
Martinez-Olguin did let stand a claim for unfair competition from the authors.
“Assuming the truth of Plaintiffs’ allegations—that Defendants used Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works to train their language models for commercial profit—the Court concludes that Defendants’ conduct may constitute an unfair practice,” the judge wrote.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
