A trade group of American authors has sued OpenAI in federal court in Manhattan on behalf of prominent writers, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult and Game of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin, accusing the company of illegally training its popular AI-based chatbot, ChatGPT, with his work.
The proposed class action lawsuit, filed Tuesday by the Authors Guild, joins several others filed by writers, source code owners and visual artists against generative AI vendors. In addition to OpenAI, similar lawsuits are pending against Meta Platforms and Stability AI over data used to train their artificial intelligence systems.
Other authors involved in the latest lawsuit include The Lincoln Lawyer writer Michael Connelly and lawyer novelists David Baldacci and Scott Turow.
OpenAI representatives did not respond to Reuters' request for comment on the lawsuit on Wednesday. OpenAI and other AI companies sued have claimed that their use of training data collected from the internet qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
Mary Rasenberger, CEO of Authors Guild, said in a statement Wednesday that authors "must have the ability to control whether and how their works are used by generative artificial intelligence" to "preserve our literature."
The Authors Guild's lawsuit contends that the data sets used to train OpenAI's large language model to respond to human prompts included text from the authors' books that may have been taken from illegal online repositories of "pirated" books.
The complaint claimed that ChatGPT generated accurate summaries of authors' books when instructed, indicating that their text is included in its database.
He also cited growing concerns that authors could be replaced by systems like ChatGPT that "generate low-quality books, impersonating authors and displacing books written by humans."
