“Authors of a broad array of works of fiction” have filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, seeking a permanent injunction barring alleged copyright infringement. The plaintiffs allege that training large language models (LLMs) on pirated copies of authors’ work is not only a violation of copyright law, but also constitutes “systematic theft on a mass scale.” The complaint says that “Unfairly, and perversely, without Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on which to ‘train’ their LLMs, Defendants would have no commercial product with which to damage—if not usurp—the market for these professional authors’ works. Defendants’ willful copying thus makes Plaintiffs’ works into engines of their own destruction.” Ref https://www.axios.com/2023/09/21/chatgpt-lawsuit-openai-writers
