Alec Radford, a prominent researcher instrumental in the creation of several key AI technologies at OpenAI, has been issued a subpoena in a copyright lawsuit involving the AI startup, as stated in a court document filed on Tuesday.
The court document, filed by the plaintiffs’ attorney with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, reveals that Radford received the subpoena on February 25.
Having departed from OpenAI late last year to focus on independent research, Radford was the principal author of OpenAI’s groundbreaking paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). These GPTs serve as the foundation for OpenAI’s widely used products, including the AI-driven chatbot platform, ChatGPT.
Radford became part of OpenAI in 2016, just a year after the organization’s inception. He contributed to various models in the GPT series and played a role in the development of Whisper, a speech recognition model, as well as DALL-E, the company’s image generation model.
The copyright lawsuit, titled “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,” has been filed by authors such as Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. They claim that OpenAI violated their copyrights by utilizing their works to train its AI models. The plaintiffs further assert that ChatGPT has violated their rights by extensively quoting their works without appropriate attribution.
Last year, the court rejected two of the plaintiffs’ claims against OpenAI, yet allowed the direct infringement claim to proceed. OpenAI argues that its use of copyrighted content for training falls under fair use protections.
Radford is not the only significant individual targeted by the authors’ legal representatives. The plaintiffs’ attorneys are also trying to compel the depositions of Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, former OpenAI employees who established Anthropic after leaving the company. Both Amodei and Mann have contested these motions, labeling them as excessively demanding.
This week, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled that Amodei is required to undergo extensive questioning regarding his contributions to OpenAI in relation to two copyright cases, including one initiated by the Authors Guild.
Compiled by Techarena.au.
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