George RR Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoultare among the 17 authors who are suing OpenAI for "systematic theft on a mass scale." This is the most recent report by Independent, a new portal in a string of legal actions brought by authors who are concerned that artificial intelligence programs are misusing their legally-protected works.
Tuesday, the authors filed documents in federal court in New York alleging "flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs' registered copyrights" and describing the ChatGPT application as a "massive commercial enterprise".
The Authors Guild organized the suit, which includes David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, and Elin Hilderbrand, among others.
The lawsuit utilizes specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as the Martin search, which alleges that the program created "an unauthorized, detailed outline for a prequel to A Game of Thrones" titled A Dawn of Direwolves, which used "the same characters from Martin's existing books in the series A Song of Ice and Fire."
The OpenAI press office did not immediately reply to calls for comment.
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A group of writers, including Michael Chabon and David Henry Hwang, sued OpenAI in San Francisco earlier this month for "clearly stealing intellectual property."In August, OpenAI asked a federal judge in California to throw out two similar cases.
One was from comedian Sarah Silverman, and the other was from author Paul Tremblay. In a court statement, OpenAI said that the claims "misunderstand the scope of copyright by not taking into account the limitations and exceptions (such as fair use) that make room for innovations like the large language models that are now at the forefront of artificial intelligence."
Amazon, which sells more books than any other company in the country, has changed its rules about e-books because some authors don't like AI. The online giant is now asking writers who want to post through its Kindle Direct Program to tell Amazon ahead of time if they are using AI-generated content. Amazon also won't let authors post more than three self-published books per day on Kindle Direct. This is an attempt to stop the spread of AI texts.
