OpenAI researcher Alec Radford was summoned to be involved in ChatGPT copyright lawsuit

According to the latest news, Alec Radford, a key OpenAI researcher, was summoned in a copyright case against the company. Radford received a subpoena on February 25, according to court documents filed in the North District Court of California on Tuesday. The researcher, who worked at OpenAI, left the company late last year to conduct independent research.

Radford is the leading author of OpenAI Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) technology, the foundation of OpenAI’s most popular product, the AI ​​chatbot platform ChatGPT. Radford joined OpenAI since 2016 and has participated in the development of a variety of GPT series models, as well as the development of speech recognition model Whisper and image generation model DALL-E.

The copyright lawsuit is called "A lawsuit on OpenAI ChatGPT" and is filed by book authors including Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman and Michael Chabon. They accused OpenAI of infringing their copyrights when training its AI models, claiming that ChatGPT cited their work at will without proper notation of the source.

Although the court dismissed two plaintiffs’ claims against OpenAI last year, the allegations of direct infringement were allowed to continue. OpenAI insists that their use of copyrighted data for training falls within the category of fair use.

Radford is not the only well-known person involved in the case, and the plaintiff's lawyer team also tried to force the summons of two other former OpenAI employees, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, who have attracted attention for leaving OpenAI to create Anthropic. Amod and Mann objected, believing that the requirements were too heavy.

This week, a U.S. District Judge ruled that Ammod had to undergo hours of inquiries about his work at OpenAI, covering two copyright cases, including a lawsuit filed by the Authors Association.