George R.R. Martin, John Grisham Lead Authors Guild Class Action Lawsuit Against ChatGPTGeorge R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders are among the authors who have filed a class action lawsuit against the company behind ChatGPT, accusing them of “feeding” and “training” the AI software on the authors' copyrighted works.
The Authors Guild — which also represents bestselling writers like Michael Connolly, Scott Turow, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, and others — filed the lawsuit against OpenAI Wednesday in a New York district court.
“Plaintiffs, authors of a broad array of works of fiction, bring this action under the Copyright Act seeking redress for Defendants' flagrant and harmful infringements of Plaintiffs' registered copyrights in written works of fiction,” the class action lawsuit obtained by Rolling Stone states.
“Defendants copied Plaintiffs' works wholesale, without permission or consideration. Defendants then fed Plaintiffs' copyrighted works into their ‘large language models’ or ‘LLMs,’ algorithms designed to output human-seeming text responses to users' prompts and queries. These algorithms are at the heart of Defendants' massive commercial enterprise. And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a mass scale.”
The lawsuit claims that pirated copies of the authors' book were “fed” without permission “into the fabric of GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 which power ChatGPT and thousands of applications and enterprise uses—from which OpenAI expects to earn many billions,” the Authors Guild said.