George R R Martin and John Grisham are suing ChatGPT’s owner OpenAI.
The 75-year-old fantasy writer – whose ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series was adapted into the hit HBO show ‘Game of Thrones’ – and best-selling thriller author Mr Grisham, 68, say their copyright was infringed to train the system.
ChatGPT and other ‘Large Language Models’ are taught to learn by analysing a massive amount of data often sourced online and the authors’ lawsuit claims their books were used without their permission to make ChatGPT smarter.
OpenAI said it respected the rights of authors and believed they “should benefit from AI technology”.
The case has been brought to the federal court in Manhattan, New York, by the Authors Guild – a trade group in the US working on behalf of the named authors.
According to the filing, OpenAI engaged in “systematic theft on a mass scale”.
It follows similar legal action brought by comedian Sarah Silverman, 52, as well as an open letter signed by ‘The Handsmaid’s Tale’ writer Margaret Atwood, 83, and Philip Pullman, 76, calling for AI companies to compensate them for using their work.
A spokesperson for OpenAI said: “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.
“We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together.”
The case argues LLM ChatGPT was fed data from copyrighted books without the permission of the authors, in part because it was able to provide accurate summaries of them.
Patrick Goold from City University, London, told BBC News that while he could sympathise with the authors behind the lawsuit, he believed it was unlikely it would succeed.
He added the claimants would initially need to prove ChatGPT had copied and duplicated their work.
Mr Goold said: “They’re actually not really worried about copyright, what they’re worried about is that AI is a job killer.
“When we’re talking about AI automation and replacing human labour it’s just not something that copyright should fix.
“What we need to be doing is going to Parliament and Congress and talking about how AI is going to displace the creative arts and what we need to do about that in the future.”
