In a recent development in a copyright lawsuit against AI startup, OpenAI, key player and researcher, Alec Radford, has been subpoenaed, as revealed by a court document on Tuesday.
The document, put forth by the plaintiff’s legal representative to the U.S. District Court in Northern California, stated that Radford received the subpoena on the 25th of February.
Radford, who parted ways with OpenAI last year to focus on his own research, was the primary author of the pivotal research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) by OpenAI. These GPTs form the backbone of some of OpenAI’s most successful offerings, including their AI-driven chatbot platform, ChatGPT.
Radford became part of the OpenAI team in 2016, a year subsequent to its establishment. His contribution includes several models in the GPT series, along with a speech recognition model named Whisper, and DALL-E, an image-generating model.
The lawsuit, known as “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,” was initiated by various authors, including Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. They claim that OpenAI violated their copyrights by utilizing their work to educate its AI models. They further argued that ChatGPT infringed on their works by extensively quoting from them without giving due credit.
In the preceding year, the Court dismissed two of the claims made by the plaintiffs against OpenAI, but allowed the direct infringement claim to proceed. OpenAI, however, insists that its use of copyrighted material for training purposes falls under fair use.
Radford isn’t the sole high-profile individual being targeted by the authors’ attorneys. They have also sought to force the deposition of Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, both former OpenAI employees who founded Anthropic. Amodei and Mann have resisted these attempts, stating that they are excessively demanding.
Just this week, a U.S. magistrate judge ordered that Amodei must comply with extensive questioning regarding his tenure at OpenAI in two separate copyright lawsuits, one of which was filed by the Authors Guild.
