Breaking news: Alec Radford, a key researcher at OpenAI, has been subpoenaed in a copyright lawsuit against the company. Court documents filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California reveal Radford received the subpoena on February 25th. The researcher, who left OpenAI late last year to pursue independent research, is a central figure in this case.
Radford was a principal author of OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) technology, the foundation of OpenAI's popular AI chatbot platform, ChatGPT. Since joining OpenAI in 2016, Radford contributed to the development of various GPT models, as well as the speech recognition model Whisper and the image generation model DALL-E.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, licensed through Midjourney.
The copyright lawsuit, titled “Case Regarding OpenAI ChatGPT,” was filed by authors including Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. They allege OpenAI infringed their copyrights by training its AI models on their works without proper attribution, claiming ChatGPT freely incorporates their writings.
While the court dismissed two of the plaintiffs' claims against OpenAI last year, it allowed the direct infringement claims to proceed. OpenAI maintains that its use of copyrighted data for training falls under fair use.
Radford isn't the only prominent figure involved. The plaintiffs' legal team also attempted to subpoena two other former OpenAI employees, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, who are known for leaving OpenAI to found Anthropic. Amodei and Mann opposed these requests, arguing they were overly burdensome.
This week, a U.S. District Judge ruled that Amodei must submit to hours of questioning regarding his work at OpenAI, covering two copyright cases, including one brought by the Authors Guild.