“Game of Thrones” author George Martin and other best-selling fiction writers have filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the tech startup of violating their copyrights to drive its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.
The Authors Guild, an organization representing the writers, 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.
According to the lawsuit, “at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a massive scale”.
Also in the official complaint, the lawsuit said ChatGPT 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.
“Unfairly, and perversely, without Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on which to ‘train’ their (language models), Defendants would have no commercial product with which to damage — if not usurp — the market for these professional authors’ works” .
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.
