Books Author George RR Martin Sues ChatGPT

Microsoft partner OpenAI is now in trouble with a number of world-famous authors. They accuse the company of illegally training its AI models behind the chatbot ChatGPT using the works they have written.

Used without consent

As the Reuters news agency reports, the Writers’ Association Authors Guild has filed a lawsuit against the company in federal court in New York. She represents members such as John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult, and “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin.

This is by no means the first lawsuit of this kind. Other developers of AI technologies also have to deal with authors who are bothered by the fact that their achievements are being used without being asked to build an entirely new industry. In addition to the authors, the plaintiffs also include visual artists and software developers.

OpenAI and other defendants have so far assumed that the use of any training data from the Internet and other sources is considered fair use under US copyright law and therefore they do not have to ask. A spokesman for OpenAI said Wednesday that the company respects the rights of creators and is “having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild.

AI Pulls Content From Unauthorised Sources

According to the plaintiffs, the fact that the AI ​​is trained with the works is demonstrated, among other things, by the fact that ChatGPT can create precise summaries of the authors’ books upon request. The texts must therefore be in the database behind the tool.

The texts were not made available by the authors or downstream rights holders. It is therefore assumed that the content may come from illegal online book collections from pirates. The lawsuit also outlined concerns that authors could be replaced by systems like ChatGPT that “generate inferior e-books, impersonate authors, and displace human-authored books.”