The Obscure Court Case That Every Big Tech Company Is Watching

The brain that wrote your favorite novel consumed Dickens and Austen, Pynchon and Didion. The brain that wrote this article devoured Bradbury and Orwell, Ishiguro and Octavia Butler. But the "brain" that powers that chatbot you played around with over the weekend ingested 170,000 books, all so it can spit out language that sounds smart, colorful, or helpful--even if it's really not. But language-guzzling artificial intelligence models, which need to "train" on existing works, present a bigger challenge. In July, a group of writers including comedian Sarah Silverman and novelist Michael Chabon filed suits against OpenAI and Meta, alleging that the companies improperly trained their models on the authors' books.