Aug 28 (Reuters) - OpenAI has responded in California

federal court to allegations that it misused the work of authors

including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates and comedian Sarah

Silverman to train its artificial-intelligence language model.

The Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed AI company said in an answer

to the complaints on Tuesday that it makes fair use of

copyrighted content to teach models like the one underlying its

popular chatbot ChatGPT to create original material.

"The models learn, as we all do, from what has come before,"

OpenAI said in its filing. "The fair use defense exists for

precisely that reason: to encourage and allow the development of

new ideas that build on earlier ones."

Attorneys for the authors and attorneys and spokespeople for

OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on

the filing on Wednesday.

Copyright owners including writers, news outlets and music

publishers have filed several high-stakes lawsuits against tech

companies over the alleged exploitation of their work without

permission in order to train text-based generative AI systems.

The group of authors that includes Silverman, Coates and Chabon

filed separate lawsuits against Meta Platforms ( META ) and

Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed OpenAI over their systems last year.

Meta and OpenAI have both convinced judges to dismiss some

of the claims, though courts have not yet addressed the core

question of whether the use of material scraped from the

internet to train AI infringes copyrights on a massive scale.

Tech companies have said that AI training is protected by

the copyright doctrine of fair use and that the lawsuits

threaten the burgeoning AI industry.

Fair use promotes freedom of expression by allowing the use

of copyright-protected works without prior permission under

certain circumstances. Courts often focus on whether a use is

transformative to determine if it is fair.

OpenAI said in its filing on Tuesday that its AI training is

"paradigmatic transformative fair use."

"The process of training an AI model does not involve any

communication of protected expression to a human audience,"

OpenAI said. "Instead, purpose is to create new material

that never existed before, based on an understanding of

language, reasoning, and the world."

The case is In re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation, U.S. District

Court for the Northern District of California, No.

3:23-cv-03223.

For the authors: Joseph Saveri of the Joseph Saveri Law

Firm, Bryan Clobes of Cafferty Clobes Meriwether & Sprengel;

Matthew Butterick

For OpenAI: Joe Gratz of Morrison & Foerster, Andy Gass of

Latham & Watkins

Read more:

Sarah Silverman sues Meta, OpenAI for copyright infringement

OpenAI gets partial win in authors' US copyright lawsuit