A trade group for U.S. authors has sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on behalf of prominent writers including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R.R. Martin, accusing the company of unlawfully training its popular artificial-intelligence based chatbot ChatGPT on their work.
Seems like three issues.
Downloading a pirated copy of the work. Pretty clear cut that this is illegal.
Feeding a work into an algorithm. This seems to me like it should be legal. Making it illegal looks like it would open an incredibly shitty can of worms.
Generating and distributing a partial copy of a copyrighted work. (“The AI just spat out three paragraphs of my text nearly verbatim!”) It’s unclear if this is even happening.