George R.R. Martin, John Grisham & More Launch Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI

Several prominent US authors, including Game of Thrones’ novelist George R.R. Martin and The Firm’s writer John Grisham, have launched a lawsuit against OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. Other plaintiffs include Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult.

The lawsuit, filed by the Authors Guild, alleges that the artificial intelligence (AI) firm used the authors’ works without permission to train the popular chatbot, resulting in copyright infringement.

The writers argued that their works were copied verbatim and utilized to train OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) to produce human-like text responses.

As previously reported, this lawsuit is just one of a broader wave of legal actions against companies behind popular generative AI tools.

Earlier this year, two authors also sued OpenAI, claiming that their books were employed to train the chatbot without their consent.

At the same time, well-known actor Sarah Silverman initiated a similar lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta.

The core contention of these legal actions is that copyrighted books were employed to train the LLMs without the authors’ permission, as the models could accurately summarize the books.

This case raises critical questions about the role of AI in potentially displacing human-authored content in the media industry, signaling a growing concern among content creators regarding the use of their intellectual property without proper authorization or compensation.

[via CNBC and BBC, cover image via Hutchinsphoto| Dreamstime.com, Vmiranda78 | Dreamstime.com, and Dwong19 | Dreamstime.com]