Alec Radford, a well-known researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, was recently called for a copyright case involving OpenAI. Radford officially received a subpoena on February 25, according to the latest documents from the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. This incident has attracted widespread attention from the technology and legal circles.
Radford played an important role in OpenAI's career, especially in developing Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPT) technologies. As the lead author of the technology, his research has laid the foundation for OpenAI’s AI chat platform ChatGPT. Since joining OpenAI in 2016, Radford has not only participated in the research and development of multiple GPT series models, but also involved in the development of the speech recognition model Whisper and the image generation model DALL-E. However, he chose to leave OpenAI at the end of last year and instead devoted himself to independent research.
The copyright case was filed by a group of well-known book authors, including Paul Trembray, Sarah Silverman and Michael Chabon. They accused OpenAI of unauthorized use of their works when training their AI models and believed that ChatGPT did not give proper attribution when citing these works. The allegation has sparked extensive discussions about copyright issues for AI training data.
Although the court dismissed two claims filed by the plaintiff against OpenAI last year, claims against direct infringement were allowed to continue. OpenAI insists that using copyrighted data for training falls within the category of reasonable use, a position that has sparked heated debate in the technology community.
In addition to Radford, the plaintiff's lawyers also attempted to subpoena several other former OpenAI employees, including Dario Amodai and Benjamin Mann. The two employees have attracted much attention for leaving OpenAI and founding Anthropic. However, Amodai and Mann objected to the summons, believing that the requirements were too cumbersome and increased their burden.
This week, a U.S. district magistrate ruled that Amodai must be asked for hours of inquiries about his work at OpenAI. This ruling not only involves the current copyright case, but also another case filed by the Authors Guild. This decision further exacerbates the complexity of the case and provides an important legal reference for similar cases in the future.
In general, this case not only concerns the fate of OpenAI and its former employees, but also touches on core legal and ethical issues in the development of AI technology. As the case progresses, the science and law sectors will continue to pay close attention to the goal of finding a balance between technological innovation and copyright protection.