United States authors George RR Martin and John Grisham are suing ChatGPT’s owner OpenAI on the grounds that their copyright was infringed to train the system.
Martin is known for his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted into HBO show Game of Thrones.
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) “learn” by analyzing vast amounts of data, which is frequently gathered from the internet.
The lawsuit asserts that ChatGPT was made smarter by using the authors’ books without their consent.
In a statement, OpenAI stated that it respected authors’ rights and thought “they should benefit from AI technology”.
Other prominent authors named in the complaint include Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and George Saunders.
The Authors Guild, a trade organization in the US that represents the named authors, has filed the case with the federal court in Manhattan, New York.
In the filing, OpenAI was charged with committing “systematic theft on a mass scale”.
It comes after Sarah Silverman, a comedian, filed a similar lawsuit in July, and Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman, authors, signed an open letter the same month urging AI companies to compensate them for using their works.
According to a spokesperson for OpenAI : “We’re having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild, and have been working co-operatively to understand and discuss their concerns about AI.
“We’re optimistic we will continue to find mutually beneficial ways to work together.”
Source-BBC
