‘Game of Thrones’ author headlines copyright infringement suit against ChatGPT developer OpenAI

For OpenAI, the lawsuits just keep on coming. The company behind the innovative chatbot ChatGPT is the target of a copyright infringement suit organized by the Authors Guild and headlined by scribes like George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and John Grisham.

The suit was filed on September 19 in a New York federal court. The plaintiffs include 17 authors, led by literary titans like Martin, Picoult, Grisham, David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, and Elin Hilderbrand. The writers are arguing that OpenAI has enabled “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” by building ChatGPT upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

As evidence of that theft, the Authors Guild pointed to ChatGPT-written works like “A Dawn of Direwolves.” The unauthorized Game of Thrones prequel uses the same characters Martin created for his unfinished book series A Song of Ice and Fire.

“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.,” said Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger in a statement. “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 Authors Guild is not the only labor organization to harbor concerns about the potential impact of generative AI programs. The creative potential of ChatGPT and its ilk is a major sticking point for the Writers Guild of America

and the Screen Actors Guild. Both of those unions are currently striking in order to secure stronger creative protections for writers and performers.

OpenAI has now been hit with four separate lawsuits from authors over the past three months. The first two suits — one from Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad and another from a group that included Sarah Silverman — took aim at the practices OpenAI uses to train ChatGPT. The authors alleged that OpenAI committed copyright infringement by allowing ChatGPT to learn from trademarked literary texts. A group including Michael Chabon filed a third lawsuit earlier in September.

San Francisco-based OpenAI asked judges to dismiss the Tremblay and Silverman cases, arguing that those suits “misconceive the scope of copyright.” In response to the latest legal action against it, OpenAI expressed support for “the rights of writers and authors.”

OpenAI believes the suing writers can benefit from AI themselves, but the Authors Guild doesn’t seem to agree. These legal battles have all the intrigue of an average Game of Thrones episode — and they’re far from resolved.