17 writers, including Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin and A Time to Kill creator John Grisham, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement.
They allege that the company that created ChatGPT carries out "systematic theft on a massive scale" of their works.
Authors Guild OpenAI Lawsuit_Voz Media by VozMedia on Scribd
The other authors who are part of the class action lawsuit are David Baldacci , Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail.
A lawsuit organized by the Authors Guild: "It is imperative that we stop this theft"
The Authors Guild brought together the 17 authors to file their lawsuit under the Intellectual Property Law. Its CEO, Mary Rasenberger, noted in a statement that it was necessary to act against artificial intelligence (AI) :
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. Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI. The various GPT models and other current generative AI machines can only generate material that is derivative of what came before it. They copy sentence structure, voice, storytelling, and context from books and other ingested texts. The outputs are mere remixes without the addition of any human voice. Regurgitated culture is no replacement for human art.
Rasenberger added that "people are already distributing content generated by versions of GPT that mimic or use original authors’ characters and stories. Companies are selling prompts that allow you to ‘enter the world’ of an author’s books. These are clear infringements upon the intellectual property rights of the original creators."
One of the plaintiffs' attorneys, Rachel Geman, stated that "without plaintiffs' and the proposed class’ copyrighted works, defendants would have a vastly different commercial product. Defendants’ decision to copy authors’ works, done without offering any choices or providing any compensation, threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole."
Composers, authors and publishers ask Congress for protection against AI
On the other hand, around 30 members of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) will go to Congress this Thursday to request protection against the threats that AI poses to their works.
Speaking to The Hill, the association's president, Paul Williams, said that "we need to have an awareness of our needs. We’re protecting the lives and livelihoods of almost a million members and across the board and the music industry this is a tsunami of problems to be dealt with. And we need the assistance from legislators." He concluded by saying that "this is a situation that has to be dealt with, and it’s moving so quickly."
