Several prominent American novelists are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement over using their handwork to train its chatbots and large learning systems (LLMs).
Along with the Authors Guild, the complaint claimed that OpenAI’s chatbots can now create “derivative works” that can copy and summarize the authors’ books, possibly damaging the market for authors’ work, and that the authors were not paid nor informed about this use.
The complaint, found on several US media sites, says “Plaintiffs seek to represent a class of professional fiction writers whose works spring from their own minds and their creative literary expression. These authors’ livelihoods derive from the works they create.
“Plaintiffs thus seek damages for the lost opportunity to license their works, and for the market usurpation Defendants have enabled by making Plaintiffs unwilling accomplices in their own replacement; and a permanent injunction to prevent these harms from recurring,” continued the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs are the following authors, David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia
Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya
Shanbhag Lang, Victor Lavalle, George R.R Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.
George R.R Martin is the mastermind behind the epic fantasy novel “A Song of Ice and Fire”, which was adapted into the Emmy Award-winning HBO series “Game of Thrones” and its prequel series “House of the Dragon”.
As for John Grisham, he’s known for thrillers, having written 37 all became best sellers worldwide.
Edward Klaris, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property talked to the New York Times and said that OpenAI “ scraped all this content and put it into their databases without asking permission — that seems like a huge grab of content.”
Romance novelist Mary Bly, who publishes under the name Eloisa James, declared that joining the Authors Guild suit came out of worry that if writers failed to draw boundaries around their work, technology companies would continue their imitation schemes.
As AI technologies penetrate everyone’s daily lives, ethical questions about their usage persist, which emphasizes the necessity for operating frameworks to be presented in the wake of the use of this beneficial but terrifying technology.