Acclaimed researcher Alec Radford, celebrated for his significant contributions to OpenAI's innovative AI technologies, has been drawn into a copyright infringement lawsuit against the promising startup as reported in recent legal documents.

According to the report dated Tuesday, a legal representative for the plaintiffs lodged the forms at the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, highlighting Radford's subpoena issuance on February 25.

Radford, known for spearheading key AI research studies at OpenAI before embarking on independent research, was instrumental in the creation of OpenAI's revolutionary research about generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). These GPTs are the secret sauce behind many of OpenAI's successful applications, not least their impressive AI chat solution, ChatGPT.

Since joining OpenAI in 2016, a year after its inception, Radford has had an impressive impact, handling various projects specifically laced around the GPT series. Plus, he's had hands-on experiences developing an innovative speech recognition tool named 'Whisper' and the creative image-generating model, 'DALL-E'.

Interestingly, the lawsuit, labelled "re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation," was ignited by a group of authors, including Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. These plaintiffs argued that OpenAI violated their copyrights by incorporating their unique works into the AI model training process. They further contended that ChatGPT used quotations from their work without necessary accreditation.

Although the Court refuted two of the plaintiffs' accusations against OpenAI last year, it recognized the claim for direct infringement and greenlighted further proceedings. Still, OpenAI continues to insist that the copyright-protected data utilized for training aligns with the principles of fair use.

Interestingly, Radford isn't the only notable figure being asked to testify by the plaintiffs' lawyers. Past OpenAI employees, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, who left to establish Anthropic, have also been targeted. Both Amodei and Mann have vehemently resisted these attempts, citing them as overly demanding.

However, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled recently that Amodei must undergo extensive interrogation concerning his work at OpenAI relative to two copyright concerns, inclusive of a dispute filed by the Authors Guild.