OpenAI sued by Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and other authors over ChatGPT copyright claims
- Martin, Grisham, Franzen, George Saunders and Jodi Picoult are among the writers who have filed a lawsuit
- The Authors Guild claims data sets used to train OpenAI’s large language model included text from the authors’ books obtained via illegal online ‘pirates’
A trade group for US authors has sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on behalf of prominent writers including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult and Game of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin, accusing the company of unlawfully training its popular artificial-intelligence based chatbot ChatGPT on their work.
The proposed class-action lawsuit filed late on Tuesday by the Authors Guild joins several others from writers, source-code owners and visual artists against generative AI providers.
In addition to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, similar lawsuits are pending against Meta Platforms and Stability AI over the data used to train their AI systems.
Other authors involved in the latest lawsuit include The Lincoln Lawyer writer Michael Connelly and lawyer-novelists David Baldacci and Scott Turow.
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. OpenAI and other AI defendants have said their use of training data scraped from the internet qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement on Wednesday that authors “must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI” to “preserve our literature”.
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The Authors Guild’s lawsuit claims that the data sets used to train OpenAI’s large language model to respond to human prompts included text from the authors’ books that may have been taken from illegal online “pirate” book repositories.