George RR Martin
Star authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
George RR Martin is a massive thorn in ChatGPT’s side.
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A group of well-known writers are suing the company behind ChatGPT for “systematic theft.”
A group of well-known authors is taking legal action against the US company OpenAI. The accusation is that its artificial intelligence ChatGPT was “trained” using, among other things, copyrighted works, which amounts to a copyright violation. The official letter, received in the United States District Court of New York on September 19, is freely accessible on the Internet.
In the 57-page document submitted by the Authors Guild, there are numerous big names on the part of the plaintiffs: “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin (75), John Grisham (68), Jodi Picoult, among others (57), George Saunders (64) and Jonathan Franzen (64) against OpenAI. A total of 17 writers are listed in the class action lawsuit.
Procedure is “systematic theft”
The extensive allegations in the letter are tough. For example, it is said that the supposedly unlawful use of the works with the aim of teaching artificial intelligence to “deliver human-like text answers to user input” is “systematic theft on a large scale.”
Content created with ChatGPT would therefore “imitate, summarize or paraphrase” the authors’ works and thus cause massive harm to them. It is “unfair and perverse” that their books become “the engines of their own destruction” in this way. Instead of exclusively using freely accessible literature or making licensing requests, copyright violations were deliberately committed.
In addition to prohibiting the practice from continuing, prosecutors are demanding a share of the company’s revenue and compensation for each work allegedly stolen – “up to $150,000 per work.” Given the large number of supposedly copied works, this could amount to millions.