In August, Open AI asked a California judge to dismiss two similar cases, one involving comedian Sarah Silverman and the other involving author Paul Tremble.
ChatGPT maker Open AI for ‘mass theft’
John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George R.R. Martin are among the 17 authors who have filed a lawsuit against Open AI for what they perceive as a serious and harmful infringement of their copyrighted works through the unauthorized use of their content in an AI program.
In papers filed in federal court in New York on Tuesday, the authors alleged “systematic theft of registered copyrights” and described the ChatGPT program as a “vast commercial enterprise” dependent on “large-scale organized theft.”
The suit was organized by the Authors Guild and included David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, and Elin Hilderbrand among its participants.
Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, stated in a statement, “It is crucial that we stop this theft, or we will destroy our invaluable literary culture, which sustains many other creative industries in America. Great books are generally written by people who dedicate their careers and, indeed, their lives to learning and improving their craft. To protect our literature, authors must have the ability to control whether their works are used by generic AIs or not.”
The lawsuit cites specific instances of copyright violations for each author, such as Martin, who alleges that the program created an “infringing, unauthorized, and comprehensive outline” for a prequel to “Game of Thrones” titled “A Don of Direwolves,” using characters from Martin’s existing books in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series.
In a statement on Wednesday, an Open AI spokesperson said the company “values the rights of authors and believes they should benefit from AI technologies.”
“We are actively engaging in productive discussions with authors from around the world, including the Authors Guild, to understand and address their concerns about AI. We are optimistic that we can continue to work collaboratively to find mutually beneficial ways to harness new technology in a thriving ecosystem,” the statement said.
Earlier this month, a group of authors, including Michael Chabon and David Henry Huang, filed a lawsuit against Open AI in San Francisco for “clear violations of intellectual property.”
In August, Open AI asked a federal judge in California to dismiss two similar cases, one involving comedian Sarah Silverman and the other involving author Paul Tremble. In the court filing, OpenAI argued that the claims “misunderstand the scope and exceptions (including fair use) that now exist for artificial intelligence models, which are at the forefront of innovations in language models.”
The authors’ objections to AI have also prompted the country’s largest bookseller, Amazon.com, to change its policies on e-books. The online giant is now informing self-published authors who wish to publish through its Kindle Direct Publishing program that they are including AI-generated content. Amazon is also limiting self-published authors to three new self-published books on Kindle Direct per day, in an attempt to curb the proliferation of AI-generated texts.