A class-action lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI, the tech startup behind ChatGPT, by renowned authors such as George RR Martin (“Game of Thrones” author), John Grisham, and Jodi Picoult, along with representation from the Authors Guild.
According to AFP report, The authors alleged that OpenAI violated their copyrights by using their books “without permission” to train ChatGPT’s “large language models,” which can generate human-like text responses.
The complaint, submitted in a New York federal court, contends that this constitutes “systematic theft on a massive scale.
Numerous other lawsuits have also been filed against OpenAI and its competitors, accusing them of infringing on various works.
The complaint further states that OpenAI’s language models endanger the livelihoods of fiction writers by allowing anyone to generate text imitating their style, essentially giving away what writers would otherwise be paid to create.
It suggests that without the copyrighted works of the plaintiffs, OpenAI would have no commercial product, making their copying detrimental to the authors’ careers.
The Authors Guild and the writers are therefore, seeking a ban on the use of copyrighted books to train the language models “without express authorization” and damages.
OpenAI has faced previous complaints since the success of ChatGPT, including one from computer engineers who also sued Microsoft, a major investor, and the GitHub platform.