Authors of ‘Game of Thrones’ and Other Works Take Legal Action Against Creator of ChatGPT for Copyright Infringement
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI by renowned fiction writers, including “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin. The writers allege that OpenAI has infringed upon their copyrights by utilizing their works to power its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
The Authors Guild, an organization representing authors and several authors including Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, accused the California company of using their books “without permission” using ChatGPT’s “large language model” algorithms, which are capable of producing human-sounding text responses based on simple to surveys, according to the suit.
“And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a massive scale,” said the complaint, filed Tuesday in New York federal court.
Numerous other lawsuits have been filed by artists, organizations and coders against OpenAI and its competitors, with plaintiffs claiming that their work has been defrauded.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment.
The company’s language templates “threaten the ability of fiction writers to make a living because (the templates) allow anyone to create — automatically and freely (or very cheaply) — texts that they would otherwise pay authors to create,” Tuesday’s complaint said. read.
ChatGPT can be used to produce “derivative works” that mimic the authors’ style, it added.
“Unfairly and perversely, without plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on which to ‘train’ (their language models), defendants would have no commercial product to harm—if not usurp—the market for the works of these professional authors.” the complaint said.
“Deliberate copying by the defendants therefore makes the plaintiffs’ works engines of their own destruction.”
The Authors Guild and authors seek to prohibit the use of copyrighted books to develop language models “without express permission” and damages.
OpenAI has supported texts found on the web to power the chatbot, but it has not specified exactly which sites and writings have been used.
OpenAI has been the subject of several complaints since ChatGPT’s success last year, including computer engineers suing Microsoft, its lead investor, and the GitHub platform.
In January, artists filed a class-action lawsuit against DreamUp, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, three image-creating AI models programmed with art found online.
Microsoft announced this month that it will offer legal protection to customers who sue for copyright infringement in content produced by its artificial intelligence tools.
