The writers and the Authors Guild — a professional association for authors — has filed a suit against the company OpenAI, alleging that the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has been using the copyrighted works of authors without permission. This is the second copyright infringement lawsuit filed against the company in the month of September.
Among the 17 authors who joined the Guild in their lawsuit against the company are writers namely John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin and Jonathan Franzen. Their lawsuit argues that OpenAI should be bound to use permission from the authors to use their works for language training and pay a licensing fee that compensates the authors.
The Guild also alleges that AI is being used to generate copies of books including attempts made to mimic R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series and such AI-generated books have increasingly become available on Amazon.
“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement.
More than 10,000 writers — including luminaries such as Dan Brown, Margaret Atwood, James Patterson, Roxane Gay, Nora Roberts, Celeste Ng, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan and Tobias Wolff — also signed an open letter calling on prominent AI industry leaders like Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to obtain consent from writers when using their work to train AI models, and to compensate them fairly when they do.
