US writers George RR Martin and John Grisham have filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT owner OpenAI, claiming that their copyright was violated when training the system.
Martin is most known for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, which inspired HBO’s Game of Thrones.
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) “learn” by analyzing vast amounts of data, which is frequently obtained online.
The writers’ books, according to the lawsuit, were exploited without their permission to make ChatGPT smarter.
OpenAI stated that it respects writers’ rights and believes “they should benefit from AI technology.”
Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult, and George Saunders are among the other notable authors cited in the case.
The Authors Guild, a trade association in the United States working on behalf of the identified authors, filed the complaint in federal court in Manhattan, New York.
According to the petition, OpenAI is guilty of “massive theft on a large scale.”
It follows similar legal action taken by comedian Sarah Silverman in July, as well as an open letter signed the same month by authors Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman requesting that AI companies compensate them for utilizing their work.
“We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working cooperatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI,” stated an OpenAI spokeswoman.
“We are confident that we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to collaborate.”
The case claims that the LLM was fed data from copyrighted books without the authors’ permission, in part because it could generate accurate summaries of them.
The lawsuit also alluded to a bigger media industry concern: that this type of automation is “displacing human-authored” material.
While Patrick Goold, a reader in law at City University, sympathized with the authors behind the action, he considered it was unlikely to succeed, stating that they would first need to prove ChatGPT had copied and replicated their work.
“They’re not really worried about copyright; they’re worried about AI being a job killer,” he said, comparing the issues to those that screenwriters are currently protesting in Hollywood.
“When it comes to AI automation and replacing human labor, it’s simply not something that copyright should fix.”
“What we need to be doing is going to Parliament and Congress and talking about how AI is going to displace the creative arts and what we need to do about that in the future.”
The case is the latest in a long line of complaints filed against developers of so-called generative AI (artificial intelligence that can produce media based on language cues) over this issue.
It comes after digital artists sued text-to-image generators Stability AI and Midjourney in January, alleging that they only work because they are trained on copyrighted artwork.
In addition, OpenAI is being sued, along with Microsoft and the programming site GitHub, by a group of computing specialists who claim their code was exploited without their consent to train an AI named Copilot.
These lawsuits have yet to be resolved.
