George R. R. Martin leads lawsuit against ChatGPT
Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin is spearheading a lawsuit against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alleging the company illegally copied copyrighted works to train the artificial intelligence robot.
The Authors Guild, a New York-based professional organization for published writers, has assembled a group of 17 writers, including Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen, to file a complaint in a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI.
The lawsuit, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks an injunction blocking OpenAI from using the authors’ works to train the AI program. The lawsuit also seeks unspecific monetary damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work. That includes the Game of Thrones series, which was used to teach ChatGPT.
“I’m very happy to be part of this effort to nudge the tech world to make good on its frequent declarations that it is on the side of creativity,” author George Saunders shared in a statement. “Writers should be fairly compensated for their work. Fair compensation means that a person’s work is valued, plain and simple.”
“This, in turn, tells the culture what to think of that work and the people who do it,” he adds. “And the work of the writer — the human imagination, struggling with reality, trying to discern virtue and responsibility within it — is essential to a functioning democracy.”
“This case is merely the beginning of our battle to defend authors from theft by OpenAI and other generative AI,” Maya Shanbhag Lang, Authors Guild president and a class representative, said in her own statement. “Our staff, which includes a formidable legal team, has expertise in copyright law. This is all to say: We do not bring this suit lightly. We are here to fight.”
“We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working co-operatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said. “We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together.”
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