The company behind ChatGPT has revealed it has developed an artificial intelligence model that is “good at creative writing”, as the tech sector continues its tussle with the creative industries over copyright. The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said the unnamed model, which has not been released publicly, was the first time he had been “really struck” by the written output of one of the startup’s products, according to an article of the Guardian newspaper.

In a post on the social media platform X, Altman wrote: “We trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). This is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI.” AI systems such as ChatGPT are the subject of a running legal battle between AI companies and the creative industries because their underlying models are “trained” on reams of publicly available data, including copyright-protected material such as novels and journalism.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI over alleged breach of copyright, while Ta-Nehisi Coates and the comedian Sarah Silverman are among the US authors suing Meta on a similar basis. In the UK, the government is proposing to allow AI companies to train their models on copyrighted material without seeking permission first, which has met strong opposition from people in the creative industries, who argue that the plan endangers their livelihoods. Tech companies have backed the consultation, saying “uncertainty” over AI and copyright law is holding back development and use of the technology – including in the creative industries. The UK Publishers Association, a trade body, said Altman’s post was ‘further proof’ that AI models were trained on copyright-protected material.

“This new example from OpenAI is further proof that these models are training on copyright-protected literary content. Make it fair, Sam,” said Dan Conway, the organisation’s chief executive. Altman posted an example of the model’s output on X, after giving it the prompt: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.”
The story, narrated by an AI, begins with: “Before we go any further, I should admit this comes with instructions: be metafictional, be literary, be about AI and grief, and above all, be original. Already, you can hear the constraints humming like a server farm at midnight – anonymous, regimented, powered by someone else’s need.” The piece, which dwells on a fictional, grieving person called Mila, goes on to refer to how it found the name in its training data.