Game of Thrones creator among authors suing OpenAI over copyright infringement

Game of Thrones’ George R. R. Martin is among a group of 17 writers, including Jodi Picoult and John Grisham who are taking legal action against OpenAI over concerns that the AI program is using their copyrighted works without authorization.

The proposed class action suit was filed last week Tuesday and participants include the Authors Guild, Source code owners, visual artists, and writers. The case joins a list of pending lawsuits against AI, which include actions against Stability AI and Meta Platforms over the data they used to train their AI programs.

Other renowned authors who are part of the lawsuit include Michael Connelly of the Lincoln Lawyer and Scott Turow. In court papers, the authors called ChatGPT a “massive commercial enterprise” that benefits from mass theft.

In their defense, OpenAI and other AI providers have referenced fair use under the copyright laws as the basis for scraping training data from the web. OpenAI said that they respect the rights of authors and are currently in conversations that they described as ‘productive’ with Authors Guild and many other creators.

Mary Rasenberger, the Authors Guild CEO, emphasized the need to stop the mass theft that threatens to water down literary culture. According to Rasenberger, great books are the result of people who spend their lives, and careers, learning to perfect the art. Therefore, authors must have a say in how generative AI uses their works.

The lawsuit cites a case in point where a ChatGPT search generated a prequel to the Game of Thrones using the same characters as those in Martin’s existing books.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com was forced to change its policies on ebooks due to objections to AI by authors. Writers who want to publish through the Kindle Direct Program must now notify the book retailer about their intention to use AI-generated material. Amazon now limits publishers to three new self-published books within a day in an effort to control the spread of AI material on its book network.