OpenAI's GPT store faces copyright complaints

Occurred: April 2024

OpenAI’s GPT Store for developing and sharing custom chatbots has been hit with copyright complaints from a Danish textbook publisher.

OpenAI’s GPT Store enables developers to build and share their own custom chatbots (or 'GPTs'), by uploading extra data to train custom bots for bespoke use cases. 

Blichfeldt Andersen, Publishing Director at the publisher, complained to WIRED that the extra data uploaded by third party developers to the GPT platform often contains copyrighted material, which he has reported to OpenAI. Andersen complained the process for identifying and removing violative bots is overly burdensome and says without improvements his company is  considering legal action. 

The GPT store is said to drive considerable copyright risk given its usage by a range of third-party developers, some of whom with less sophisticated understanding of copyright law. It is argued OpenAI should implement additional copyright protection features into GPT-store to combat potential violations before custom chatbots are released.

System 🤖 

Incident databank 🔢

Operator: OpenAI
Developer: OpenAI
Country: Denmark
Sector: Media/entertainment/sports/arts
Purpose: Build chatbots to generate text
Technology: Chatbot; NLP/text analysis; Neural network; Deep learning; Machine learning; Reinforcement learning
Issue: Copyright
Transparency: Governance