A federal judge in California has dismissed parts of a copyright lawsuit brought by comedian Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and other authors against OpenAI over its alleged use of their books to train the large language model underlying its popular chatbot ChatGPT.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin on Monday granted most of Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O) OpenAI's motion to dismiss many of the writers' claims for now, rejecting their arguments that the content generated by ChatGPT infringes their copyrights and that the company unjustly enriched itself with their work.
Martinez-Olguin joined other federal judges who have so far rejected allegations that the output of generative AI systems violates the rights of copyright holders whose works were supposedly used to train them.
Representatives for the authors and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
Several groups of copyright owners including writers, visual artists and music publishers have sued major tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work to train generative AI systems. The group of authors that includes Silverman, Coates and Chabon sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms (META.O) over their systems last year.
Martinez-Olguin gave the authors permission to file an amended complaint by March 13.
The cases are Tremblay v. OpenAI Inc, U.S. Di9strict Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-03223 and Silverman v. OpenAI Inc, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-03416.
For the authors: Joseph Saveri of the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, Bryan Clobes of Cafferty Clobes Meriweather & Sprengel; Matthew Butterick
For OpenAI: Joe Gratz of Morrison & Foerster, Andy Gass of Latham & Watkins
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