Technology
Alec Radford, a scientist instrumental in developing several of OpenAI’s significant AI technologies, has been summoned in a copyright lawsuit against the AI company, as per a court document filed on Tuesday.
The document, presented by an attorney representing the plaintiffs to the U.S. District Court in California’s Northern District, revealed that Radford was served with a subpoena on February 25.
Radford departed from OpenAI late last year to focus on independent research and was the primary author of OpenAI’s groundbreaking research paper regarding generative pre-trained transformers (gpts). Thes GPTs are foundational to openai’s popular offerings such as its AI-driven chatbot service, ChatGPT.
Joining OpenAI in 2016—just one year after its establishment—Radford contributed to various projects within the company’s GPT series and also worked on a speech recognition system called Pronounce and DALL-E, which is known for generating images.
The copyright lawsuit titled “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation” was initiated by authors including Paul Tremblay,Sarah silverman,and Michael Chabon who claimed that OpenAI violated their copyrights by utilizing their works for training its AI systems. The plaintiffs further contended that chatgpt infringed upon their creations by extensively quoting them without proper attribution.
Last year, the court dismissed two claims from the plaintiffs against OpenAI but permitted the claim regarding direct infringement to proceed. OpenAI asserts that its use of copyrighted material for training falls under the protection of fair use.
Radford isn’t the only prominent individual whom attorneys for these authors are trying to question. The legal representatives have also sought to compel depositions from Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann—both former employees at OpenAI who went on to establish Anthropic. Amodei and Mann have resisted these motions claiming they impose excessive burdens.
A U.S magistrate judge recently ruled this week that Amodei must undergo extensive questioning concerning his contributions at OpenAI related to two copyright lawsuits including one brought forth bythe Authors Guild.
