Game of Thrones creator and other authors sue ChatGPT-maker for ‘theft’

OpenAI and other defendants have said their use of training data scraped from the internet qualifies as fair use under US copyright law. An OpenAI spokesperson said on Wednesday that the company respects authors’ rights and is “having productive conversations with many creators around the world, including the Authors Guild”. In papers filed in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale”. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.” The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorised, and detailed outline for a prequel” to Game of Thrones that was titled A Dawn of Direwolves and used “the same characters from Martin’s existing books in the series A Song of Ice and Fire.” An OpenAI spokesperson said in the statement that the company respects “the rights of writers and authors and believes they should benefit from AI technology”. ‘Fair use’ Earlier this month, a handful of authors including Michael Chabon and David Henry Hwang sued OpenAI in San Francisco for “clear infringement of intellectual property”.