Another legal action has been taken by authors against ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI. A group of 17 authors, including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George R.R. Martin, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale.” This is the most recent in a string of legal actions taken by authors who believe that computer programs using artificial intelligence are misusing their copyrighted works.
The ChatGPT program is described as a “massive commercial enterprise” that relies on “systematic theft on a mass scale” in papers submitted on Tuesday to a federal court in New York by the authors, who claim “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights.”
In addition to David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, and Elin Hilderbrand, the Authors Guild organised the lawsuit.
Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement, “It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks, or we will severely damage our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.” “People who dedicate their careers—and, in some cases, their entire lives—to learning and honing their craft tend to write great books. Authors need to be able to decide whether and how generative AI uses their works in order to preserve our literature.
The lawsuit cites particular ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin, in which the program allegedly generated “an infringing, unauthorised, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and allegedly used “the same characters from Martin’s existing books in the series “A Song of Ice and Fire.”
