George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and John Grisham lead lawsuit against OpenAI

Proving, once again, that anything and everything will prevent George R.R. Martin from finishing Winds Of Winter, the author has joined his fellow Authors Guild members, including Jonathan Fanzen and John Grisham, to sue OpenAI. The lawsuit, filed by the Authors Guild, accuses OpenAI of copyright infringement and theft on a “mass scale” by training chatbots on works of fiction written by actual humans. The Authors Guild argues that by training these large language models (LLMs) on copywritten material, anyone can generate “texts that they would otherwise pay writers to create,” spitting ouT “derivative works” that compete with creators. Moreover, it does so without permission.

The class action argues that OpenAI infringes on copywritten material that would compete with the writer, and the plaintiffs expect damages “for the lost opportunity to license their works and for the market usurpation” OpenAI has enabled. In addition to Frazen, Grisham, and Martin, which sounds like a folk trio, 14 other authors are named in the suit, including David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.

The suit also accuses OpenAI of allowing third parties to create money-making ventures through ChatGPT’s application programming interface (API), which integrates into other websites and enables users to copy authors’ work.

“ChatGPT creates other outputs that are derivative of authors’ copyrighted works. Businesses are sprouting up to sell prompts that allow users to enter the world of an author’s books and create derivative stories within that world,” the suit states. “For example, a business called Socialdraft offers long prompts that lead ChatGPT to engage in ‘conversations’ with popular fiction authors like Plaintiff Grisham, Plaintiff Martin, Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, and others about their works, as well as prompts that promise to help customers ‘Craft Bestselling Books with AI.’”

This isn’t the first copyright infringement lawsuit against algorithmically generated AI systems. Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI in July, arguing that Open AI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were illegally training on “shadow library” websites’ stock of titles and, therefore, were not legally licensing the work. As is the case in the Authors Guild lawsuit, Silverman’s suit argues that because ChatGPT can summarize her book, Bedwetter, OpenAI infringed on the book’s copyright.

[via The Hollywood Reporter]