George R. R. Martin and other authors are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.
The 'Game of Thrones' scribe, the Authors Guild and 17 other writers - including the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and John Grisham - have filed a lawsuit against the generative AI company.
According to the documents, OpenAI has "copied plaintiffs' works wholesome, without permission or consideration" and then fed the material into large language models (LLMs).
The lawsuit continues: "These authors’ livelihoods derive from the works they create.
"But the Defendant’s LLMs endanger fiction writers’ ability to make a living in that the LLMs allow anyone to generate — automatically and freely (or very cheaply) — text that they would otherwise pay writers to create."
They added that OpenAI's LLMs could lead to derivative work "that is based on, mimics, summarizes, or paraphrases" their books.
The lawsuit suggests that OpenAI could have instead trained ChatGPT using works already in the public domain rather than turning to copyrighted material without paying a license fee.
