Less than two weeks after the Authors Guild and Open AI/Microsoft filed for summary judgment in their copyright infringement case, newly unsealed comments made in briefs filed by the tech giants reveal that executives knew they were illegally training their products on copyrighted books and that AI generated books would likely displace human-authored books in the market. Moreover, executive comments also suggested that some publishing industry employees will lose their jobs.
One Open AI note of August 2019 states bluntly: "We trained GPT-3 on pirated stuff! No sharing that!”*
The Authors Guild has highlighted some of the now public comments made by OpenAI executives in the case. "The better we do on GPT-X, the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon,” OpenAI policy director Jack Clark stated in testimony given in May 2020. He further acknowledged that while “there will be a point where a bunch of artists express worry about what we’re doing here and we’ll likely ignore their concerns and release anyway.”
The filings also point to the hiring of Tarun Gogineni in 2022 to lead OpenAI’s efforts to improve the writing quality of its models. The documents show that Gogineni stated that his “research mission” was to create a machine that would supplant human authors. Along those lines, the brief states that Gogineni was aware of authors’ complaints that the ‘datasets are stolen’ and that authors were losing work to AI-generated competition. Nevertheless as the brief goes on, he did not find those complaints ‘all that sympathetic’ and instead viewed them as ‘acceptable economic disruption.’ He wrote that the world would soon experience ‘the death of the reader’ as ‘machines creat[ed] slop for more machines.’”
The hubris Gogineni exhibited about AI replacing human authors is perhaps best exemplified in a tweet that appeared in testimony that if George R.R. Martin dies early “GPT can write the next [S]ong of [I]ce and [F]ire book."
The brief also states that Microsoft knew about OpenAI’s use of LibGen as early as April 2019 and in 2022 through an effort called Project Clear, OpenAI deleted its LibGen files. “Given how much OpenAI is in the news, now is the right time to excise Libgen from our systems and storage. What would be involved in that?", OpenAI VP of Research Bob McGraw wrote to colleagues in a memo.
The revelations in the Guild case come days after unsealed files in the New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI showed that the use of millions of news articles by the company to build LLM pose an “existential threat” to newspaper publishers.
*All quotes taken from Class Plaintiffs’ Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion for Partial Summary Judgment (Docket 1982) and Class Plaintiffs’ Corrected Rule 56.1 Statement of Undisputed Material Facts (Docket 1987).