Claud AI | A collection of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, claiming it committed “large-scale theft” by training its popular chatbot Claude on stolen copies of copyrighted works.
While similar lawsuits against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, have been filed for more than a year, this is the first by writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.
The smaller San Francisco-based business, created by ex-OpenAI executives, has positioned itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models capable of composing emails, summarising papers, and interacting with people naturally.
Authors Sue Claude AI Chatbot Creator Anthropic For Copyright Infringement
However, the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco claims that Anthropic’s actions “have made a mockery of its lofty goals” by accessing libraries of pirated texts to develop its AI software.
“It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works,” according to the lawsuit.
Anthropic did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday.
Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed the action, claiming to represent a class of similarly situated fiction and nonfiction writers.
While this is the first litigation brought against Anthropic by book authors, the company is also facing a lawsuit from major music companies alleging that Claude regurgitates the words of copyrighted songs.
The author’s complaint is one of an increasing number of lawsuits launched against large AI language model developers in San Francisco and New York.
OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already dealing with copyright infringement lawsuits brought by household names such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R. R. Martin, as well as lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Mother Jones.
What unites all of the complaints is the assertion that tech corporations consumed massive amounts of human writing to teach AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text without obtaining permission or compensating the original authors. Legal challenges are coming from writers, visual artists, music labels, and other creators who claim that generative AI earnings are based on misappropriation.
Authors Sue Claude AI Chatbot Creator Anthropic For Copyright Infringement
Anthropic and other tech businesses have argued that training AI models fall under the “fair use” tenet of US legislation, which permits restricted uses of copyrighted content such as teaching, studying, or changing the work into something else.
However, the lawsuit accuses Anthropic of exploiting a dataset dubbed The Pile, which contained a treasure of pirated books. It also questions the notion that AI systems learn in the same way that humans do.
“Humans who learn from books buy lawful copies of them, or borrow them from libraries that buy them, providing at least some measure of compensation to authors and creators,” according to the complaint.
SOURCE | AP
