Seventeen authors, including Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, are suing ChatGPT company Open AI. According to Variety, Martin and the other writers are part of a lawsuit led by the Authors Guild alleging that the company illegally used their copyrighted works to train ChatGPT. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 19th and seeks to block OpenAI from continuing to use the authors’ works to train the artificial intelligence chatbot. The suit is also asking for unspecified monetary damages as well as statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work.
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“This case is merely the beginning of our battle to defend authors from theft by OpenAI and other generative AI,” Maya Shanbhag Lang, Authors Guild president and a class representative, said in a statement. “Our staff, which includes a formidable legal team, has expertise in copyright law. This is all to say: We do not bring this suit lightly. We are here to fight.”
Per the lawsuit, OpenAI used books downloaded from pirate eBook repositories and copied them into the engines that power ChatGPT as well as thousands of applications and enterprise uses. The Authors Guild also cited a recent attempt to use ChatGPT to generate the sixth and seventh books in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series as well as “numerous AI-generated books that have been posted on Amazon that attempt to pass themselves off as human-generated and seek to profit off a human author’s hard-earned reputation.”
“We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working co-operatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI. We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement.
The list of authors involved in the lawsuit are as follows: David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow and Rachel Vail. A similar lawsuit was filed on behalf of Sarah Silverman and two other authors earlier this year. That suit accuses Meta and OpenAi of illegally using copyrighted works to train AI systems as well.
“I’m very happy to be part of this effort to nudge the tech world to make good on its frequent declarations that it is on the side of creativity,” Saunders said. “Writers should be fairly compensated for their work. Fair compensation means that a person’s work is valued, plain and simple. This, in turn, tells the culture what to think of that work and the people who do it. And the work of the writer — the human imagination, struggling with reality, trying to discern virtue and responsibility within it — is essential to a functioning democracy.”
