Alec Radford was subpoenaed as part of a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. According to a court document filed on TuesdayThe filing was submitted by an attorney representing the plaintiffs in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It indicated that Radford had been served with a subpoena as of February 25.
Radford was the lead author in OpenAI’s seminal paper on generative-pre-trained transformers. GPTs are the foundation of OpenAI’s most successful products, such as its AI-powered ChatGPT platform.
Radford began working for OpenAI in 2016, one year after it was founded. He worked on models from the GPT series of the company, as well as Whisper, a speech recognition system, and DALLE, its image-generating model.
In the copyright case “re OpenAI chatGPT litigation,” book authors Paul Tremblay and Sarah Silverman as well as Michael Chabon alleged that OpenAI had violated their copyrights using their work to teach its AI models. The plaintiffs also claimed that ChatGPT allegedly infringed on their copyrights by quoting their works liberally without attribution.
In the past, the Court dismissed the claims of two plaintiffs against OpenAI but allowed the claim of direct infringement to proceed. OpenAI maintains that its use of copyrighted information for training is protected by fair use.
Redford’s not the only high-profile person that attorneys for the authors have been trying to wrestle with. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have also moved to compel Dario Amodei, and Benjamin Mann to testify. Both were former OpenAI employees who left to start Anthropic. Amodei, and Mann, have both fought the motions claiming that they are too burdensome.
An American magistrate judge This week, a judge ruled that Amodei had to sit through hours of questioning regarding the work he performed for OpenAI in copyright cases. One of these cases was filed by the Authors Guild.
Kyle Wiggers, a senior reporter for TechCrunch, has a special interest on artificial intelligence. His writings have appeared in VentureBeat, Digital Trends and a variety of gadget blogs, including Android Police and Android Authority, Droid-Life and XDA-Developers. He lives in Brooklyn, with his partner who is a piano teacher, and plays the piano occasionally. Sometimes — but mostly unsuccessfully.
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