OpenAI must face allegations of copyright infringement made by authors in a consolidated class action lawsuit, District Judge Sidney H. Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said in an Oct. 27 order.
In the June 13 consolidated complaint, the plaintiffs—writers who own copyrights for various books—accused OpenAI and Microsoft, which funds OpenAI, of having engaged in “flagrant and harmful infringements of their copyrights.”
“Defendants copied Plaintiffs’ works and then fed them into their ‘large language models’ or ‘LLMs,’ algorithms designed to generate human-like text responses to users’ prompts and queries. These algorithms are at the heart of Defendants’ massive commercial enterprise. And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale,” the lawsuit said….