More than 9,000 American writers, including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and other best-selling authors have filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI. The authors accuse the company behind the popular artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot, ChatGPT, of violating their copyright and carrying out “systematic theft on a massive scale” of their literary works.
The complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York last Tuesday, and seeks to protect the intellectual property of the authors. The writers, syndicated in ‘Authors Gild’, are seeking compensation for damages, which could amount to up to $150,000 per work.
The writers maintain that OpenAI incorporated the content of their books into its “language models” (LLM), which train its generative AI, allowing ChatGPT users to create sequels and prequels to their best-selling works. This is an especially controversial issue in cases like that of George R.R. Martin, for example, who has not yet published the final two novels of his famous A Song of Ice and Fire series, which already has a successful television adaptation in Game of Thrones. The complaining union points out that attempts have already been made to generate these two volumes, still unpublished, using AI.
The union’s CEO, Mary Rasenberger, stated that this legal action is crucial to protect the rights of authors and the writing profession in general. “To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control whether and how generative AI uses their works,” Rasenberger said in statements posted on the Authors Guild website.
“The various GPT models and other current generative AI machines can only generate material derived from what came before them. They copy sentence structure, voice, narration and context from books and other ingested texts. The outputs are mere “remixes without the addition of any human voice. Regurgitated culture does not replace human art,” he highlighted.
For her part, the union’s president, Maya Shanbhag Lang, stressed that “our membership is diverse and passionate. Our staff, which includes a formidable legal team, is experienced in copyright law. All of this is to say: we do not take this lawsuit lightly. We are here to fight.”
This is not the first such lawsuit that OpenAI has faced, as over the course of the year, comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey also filed similar lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta for infringing copyright to train their artificial intelligence systems.
OpenAI, like other large technology companies, has defended that its chatbots do not plagiarize the content of artists, but rather are inspired by their works to create their own content. In an attempt to address these concerns, OpenAI announced in August that website owners can block their web crawler to prevent their content from being used in training their language models, as media outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, or Reuters.
The lawsuit has attracted the attention of the literary and technology communities and promises to be a landmark case at the intersection between intellectual property and generative artificial intelligence. Writers seek to ensure that their works are used in training AI systems only with their consent and appropriate compensation. This case could set an important precedent in the use of copyrighted works in the development of generative AI technologies.
