An anti-piracy group representing major Japanese video game developers such as Square Enix, FromSoftware and Bandai Namco has issued a warning to OpenAIclaiming that OpenAI may have been guilty of copyright infringement. The claim is just one of many that have recently hit AI and LLM companies like OpenAI.
OpenAI is responsible for the creation of AI/LLM services such as ChatGPT and the Sora 2 video generator. More recently, criticism and concerns have been raised about the material these services were trained on, and whether OpenAI has the legal right to use them. Now, some Japanese game developers are noticing that the Sora 2 video generator seems to be producing content that bears similarities to their own.
OpenAI faces copyright infringement allegations from Japan
An anti-piracy organization in Japan called the Content Overseas Distribution Association, or CODA, has made a written request to OpenAI to stop using its members' content to train the AI models. CODA states that it has “confirmed” that a “large portion” of the content produced by OpenAI's Sora 2 strongly resembles existing Japanese content, and that CODA considers the act of “replication during the machine learning process” to be potentially infringing. CODA represents a number of Japanese media companies, including game developers Square Enix, Bandai Namco and FromSoftware, as well as anime companies such as Aniplex and Studio Ghibli. Studio Ghibli was particularly subject to a new AI art trend that remade uploaded user images in the Studio Ghibli art style.
CODA has pointed out that OpenAI has an opt-out system, but that this is inconsistent with Japanese copyright law. While the US has fair use rules, which often allow the use of existing content as long as it is used in a transformative way, Japan does not. Instead, permission must be sought in advance, which OpenAI does not appear to have sought in the past, allegedly using copyrighted Japanese works as educational material. As a result, CODA specifically requests that groups it represents not have their content used for machine learning without permission, and requests a response from OpenAI regarding copyright infringement related to Sora 2.
At this time, OpenAI has not issued a public response to the claims. The company already has a lot on its plate, with the recent launch of the Sora 2 video generator and big deals with companies like Amazon. But it has also faced a lot of backlash, with publications like The New York Times, writers' groups and George RR Martin suing or threatening to sue over similar claims. On the other hand, some game developers have already chosen to use AI in game development, such as EA.
Source: CODA
