On behalf of John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult, and “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin, a trade group for U.S. authors sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court for illegally training its chatbot.
The Authors Guild’s late Tuesday class-action lawsuit follows others by writers, source-code owners, and visual artists against generative AI companies. In addition to Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Stability AI are being sued for their AI training data.
“The Lincoln Lawyer” author Michael Connelly and lawyer-novelists David Baldacci and Scott Turow are also sued.
OpenAI and other AI defendants claim fair use of internet-scraped training data under U.S. copyright law.
On Wednesday, OpenAI stated it respects authors’ rights and is “having productive conversations with many creators worldwide, including the Authors Guild.” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger stated authors “must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI” to “preserve our literature.”
According to the Authors Guild’s lawsuit, OpenAI’s massive language model was trained on content from the authors’ books that may have come from “pirate” book repositories.
The complaint claimed that ChatGPT’s database contains the authors’ works because it produced correct summaries when prompted.
It also raised fears that ChatGPT could “generate low-quality ebooks, impersonating authors and displacing human-authored books.”