SAN FRANCISCO: ‘Game of Thrones’ author George RR Martin and other best-selling fiction writers have filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the tech startup of violating their copyrights to fuel its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.
The Authors Guild, an organization representing writers, and several novelists including Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, accused the California-based company of using their books “without permission” to train ChatGPT’s “large language models,” algorithms capable of producing human-sounding text responses based on simple queries, according to the lawsuit.
“And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a massive scale,” said the complaint, filed Tuesday in a New York federal court.
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Numerous other lawsuits have been filed by artists, organizations and coders against OpenAI and its competitors, with the plaintiffs claiming their work has been ripped off.
The firm’s language models “endanger fiction writers’ ability to make a living, in that the (models) allow anyone to generate – automatically and freely (or very cheaply) – texts that they would otherwise pay writers to create,” Tuesday’s complaint read.
ChatGPT can be used to produce “derivative works,” imitating the style of writers, it added.
The Authors Guild and the writers are seeking a ban on the use of copyrighted books to develop language models “without express authorization,” as well as damages.
