"Game of Thrones" creator George R.R. Martin and other writers have sued OpenAI, a California startup, for using their work to create GPT chat software without respecting their intellectual property rights.
In the lawsuit they filed Tuesday before the federal court in New York, the authors accused the company of using their writings “without permission” to train its linguistic model, that is, the artificial intelligence technology on which the “ChatGPT” program is based, which is capable of producing all types of texts by simply asking it a simple question.
The lawyers who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the writers considered that “these algorithms involve systematic theft on a large scale.”
Among the filers of this class action lawsuit are the Authors Guild and a number of writers, including George R.R. Martin and novelist John Grisham.
Several other lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI and its competitors, from artists, organizations, and programmers.
In the lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the lawyers considered that linguistic models “pose a threat to the ability of novelists to earn a living, because they allow anyone to automatically generate, for free (or at a very low price), texts for which they are supposed to pay the authors.”
They cautioned that generative artificial intelligence tools could be used to produce derivative content that imitates the style of writers.
“Plaintiffs’ “deliberate copying (of) their work unfairly and perversely transforms their works (...) into engines for their own destruction,” they noted in the lawsuit.
The writers and the union are demanding that compensation be paid for damages and losses, and that a ban be imposed on the use of copyrighted books “without explicit permission” in training language models.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment on this lawsuit.
The company needed large amounts of online text to train its linguistic model, but it did not specify exactly which sites and scripts were used.
OpenAI, which has become considered one of the giant artificial intelligence companies thanks to the widespread success of the “ChatGPT” program, faces a number of other similar lawsuits, including those filed by a group of computer engineers who also claimed against “Microsoft,” the main investor. In the startup company, and on the "GitHub" platform.
In January, artists sued Stability AI, MedGourney, and DefiantArt, which trained their software on a large number of online visual works.
In early September, Microsoft announced that it would provide legal protection to its customers who were sued for copyright infringement regarding content created using its tools for generative artificial intelligence.