Pulitzer Prize winners join AI copyright lawsuit

Several Pulitzer Prize winning authors have joined a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, the creator of the popular ChatGPT tool, alleging the tech companies used their copyrighted work to train artificial intelligence (AI) models without permission.

The lawsuit, which was originally filed by author Julian Sancton in late November, now features Kai Bird, Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff and eight other nonfiction writers as plaintiffs, according to an amended complaint filed Tuesday. 

Bird co-authored “American Prometheus,” the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that earned him the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Biography and was adapted into the hit film “Oppenheimer” earlier this year. 

Branch won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in History for the first of his three-volume series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, while Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for “Véra” about the wife of famed author Vladimir Nabokov. 

The group of nonfiction writers alleges OpenAI and Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars and developed a close partnership with OpenAI, violated copyright laws by using the authors’ work to train their GPT models without permission.

“OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business valued into the tens of billions of dollars by taking the combined works of humanity without permission,” the lawsuit reads. “Rather than pay for intellectual property, they pretend as if the laws protecting copyright do not exist.” 

“Nonfiction authors often spend years conceiving, researching, and writing their creations,” it continues. “While OpenAI and Microsoft refuse to pay nonfiction authors, their AI platform is worth a fortune. The basis of the OpenAI platform is nothing less than the rampant theft of copyrighted works.”

The lawsuit is the latest to accuse major tech companies of copyright infringement over the massive datasets used to train their AI models.

More than a dozen novelists, including “My Sister’s Keeper” author Jodi Picoult and “A Game of Thrones” writer George R.R. Martin, also sued OpenAI in September, while another group of authors are suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for allegedly using their work to train its AI models, Llama 1 and Llama 2.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) and several other religious authors also sued Meta, Microsoft, Bloomberg and the EleutherAI Institute in October for using a dataset that contained their copyrighted books.